Call number PS1517 .B5 1904 (Davis Library, UNC-CH)

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Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin& Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1904

IT always has seemed to me that
each human being, before going out into the
silence, should leave behind him, not the story
of his own life, but of the time in which he
lived, - as he saw it, - its creed, its purpose,
its queer habits, and the work which it did or
left undone in the world.

Taken singly, these accounts
might be weak and trivial, but together, they
would make history live and breathe. Think
what flesh and color the diaries of an English
tailor and an Italian vagabond have given to
their times!

Some such vague consideration
as this has made me collect these scattered
remembrances of my own generation, and of
some of the men and women in it whom I have
known.

BITS OF GOSSIP

I.
IN THE OLD HOUSE

THE world that we lived
in when I was a
child would seem silent and empty to this
generation. There were no railways in it, no
automobiles or trolleys, no telegraphs, no
sky-scraping houses. Not a single man in
the country was the possessor of huge
accumulations of money such as are so common
now. There was not, from sea to sea, a trust
or a labor union. Even the names of those
things had not yet been invented.

The village in Virginia which was our
home consisted of two sleepy streets lined
with Lombardy poplars, creeping between a
slow-moving river and silent, brooding hills.
Important news from the world outside was
brought to us when necessary by a man on a
galloping horse.

But such haste seldom was thought necessary.
Nobody was in a hurry to hear the

news. Nobody was in a hurry to do anything,
least of all to work or to make money.
It mattered little then whether you had
money or not. If you were born into a good
family, and were "converted," you were considered
safe for this world and the next.

Incomes were all small alike. Indeed,
among gentlefolk it was considered vulgar to
talk of money at all - either to boast that
you had it, or to complain of your lack of it.
This was a peculiar trait of the times, and,
I suspect, grew out of one dogma of the
religious training which then was universal.
Every child was taught from his cradle that
money was Mammon, the chief agent of the
flesh and the devil. As he grew up it was his
duty as a Christian and a gentleman to appear
to despise filthy lucre, whatever his secret
opinion of it might be.

Besides, the country was so new, so raw,
that there were few uses for wealth. You
must remember that in the early thirties
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were in
the same condition as to population, wealth,
and habits of life as the fourth-rate country

town of to-day. Richmond and St. Louis
boasted loudly of their eight thousand
inhabitants. San Francisco was a bear den, and
Chicago a hamlet. The majority of Americans,
both men and women, were then busy
with farming or other manual labor, and the
so-called gentry had no operas, no art galleries,
no yearly trips to Europe to drain their
thin incomes.

Between the small towns scattered over
the continent stretched the wilderness, broken
here and there by the farms of squatters.
Through this wilderness the rivers, canals,
and one solitary road carried travelers and
trade.

Our village was built on the Ohio River,
and was a halting place on this great national
road, then the only avenue of traffic between
the South and the North. Every morning
two stage-coaches with prancing horses and
shrill horns dashed down the sleeping streets
to the wharf, full of passengers from the East,
who hurried on board the steamboats bound
for St. Louis or New Orleans. Huge vans
often passed, laden with merchandise for

the plantations or with bales of cotton for
the Northern mills. Now and then a
white-topped Conestoga wagon drawn by eight
horses, each carrying a chime of bells, came
through the streets, bearing an emigrant
family to the West. The mother and children
peeped out of the high front, and the father,
carrying a gun, walked with his dog. These
emigrants often were from Norway or Poland
or Germany, and wore their national costumes,
as European peasants still did then.
They put on their velvet jackets and high
caps when they came near the town, and
went about begging, in order to save the
little hoard of money which they had brought
with them until they reached "the Ohio," as
the whole West was then vaguely called.

These wagons were full of romance to us
children. They came up with these strange
people out of far-off lands of mystery, and took
them into the wilderness, full of raging bears
and panthers and painted warriors, all to be
fought in turn. We used to look after the
children peeping out at us with bitter envy;
for, naturally, as we never left home, the

world outside of our encircling hills was a
vast secret to us. Boys and girls now usually
rush in the course of every year through
a dozen states, to the mountains or the
seacoast. Most of them have been to Europe.
Every morning before breakfast they can
read what happened yesterday in Korea or
South Africa.

But with us, after a presidential election,
a month often passed before the man on a
galloping horse brought us the name of the
successful candidate.

Honest old Timothy Flint, in his "Account
of the United States," published at that time,
boasts that "the immense number of fifteen
hundred newspapers and periodicals are now
published in this country." Of these I only
remember two, the "United States Gazette"
and the "Gentleman's Monthly Magazine,"
which was always expurgated for my use by
pinning certain pages together.

You may guess from these hints how isolated
and calm life was in that time. The
development of a child then was as different
a process from the same work now, as is the

growth of an acorn which falls in a forest and
slowly thrusts out its root and leaf into earth
and sun, from the culture of a thousand seedlings
massed and tended in a hothouse.

My easy-going generation did not push the
world's work on very far perhaps; we did not
discover wireless telegraphy, nor radium. But
neither did we die of nerve prostration.

Certain things were close and real to us
then, as children, which to boys and girls
now are misty legends. What do they care
for the Revolution or the Indian wars?

But then, the smoke of the battles of
Monmouth and Yorktown was still in the air.
The old Indian forts were still standing in
the streets. It was part of your religion to
hate the British. It was your own grandfather
who, when he was ten years old, had gone into
the swamp, killed the huge beast that had
threatened the settlement, and so won the
proud title of Panther Jim. He showed you
the very sword which he had carried at
Valley Forge. It was your own grandmother
who had danced with Lafayette, and who
hinted that "Lady Washington" had an ugly

habit of loudly scolding her husband and of
boxing Nelly Custis's ears, which was hardly
befitting a gentlewoman.

These things made you feel that you had
rocked the cradle of the new-born nation with
your own hand. It was your duty to hate the
British.

Another odd peculiarity of that time, which
I never have seen noticed, was our familiarity
with the heathen gods and goddesses. If you
talked of war you said Mars, of a beautiful
woman you called her Venus; you accused
your rhyming neighbor of "courting the
Nine." Sermons, letters, and ordinary talk
were larded with scraps of Latin and Greek,
which now would be laughed at. The reason
is plain. Then, the educated boy and girl,
first of all, must study the classics. Science,
geography, even the history of their own
people, were but secondary matters. Jupiter,
Juno, and Cæsar still held the stage. The
rest of the world as yet were behind the
curtain.

But perhaps if I tell you some trifling
incidents of my own childhood, they will show

you more clearly the difference between life
then and now. These little happenings are
quite true except in the names of persons and
places.

The house in which we children lived may
have seemed very plain and homely to other
people, but it had certain mysterious peculiarities
which put it, for us, alongside of
Macbeth's Castle Glamis or the witch-haunted
stronghold in Sintram. We know now that
they were not mysteries, but they still give a
certain significance to the old house which
was then the background of our lives.

I don't remember now what taxes were
paid on it, nor what was the condition of
the plumbing, nor even how many chambers
it had - but these things I always shall
remember: -

In each room was a huge fire of bituminous
coal. The black soot hung and swayed
in the great chimneys like a mass of sable
mosses, and, beneath, yellow and red and
purple flames leaped up from an inky base
of coal to reach them, while on this base,
black and shining as jet, was a gray lettering

that incessantly formed itself almost into
words and then crumbled away. You knew
that the words, if you could read them, would
tell you the secret of your life, and you would
watch them late into the night, until you
fell asleep and woke to watch again. But
the words always crumbled away before you
could read them.

These flames and gray ashes have burned
always in my memory, and made the wood-fires,
of which poets talk so much, seem thin
and meaningless to me.

Then there were the hillocks in the garden,
on which melons grew in summer, but which,
in winter, turned into the Alps sheeted with
glaciers. We always "made the ascent" just
at dusk, equipped with alpenstocks and with
bottles of spruce beer and brown jumbles.
The alpenstocks and the cakes and the beer
all were made with her own hands by our
good Angel (though we called her by a better
name than that): it was She who packed
the cakes and little bottles into bags hung to
our waists, and gave us our staffs and shut
us out into the twilight to make our perilous

journey, setting a candle in the window to
light us home again across the icy mountain
wastes.

The old house had its historic points, too.
There were the big wooden chairs on which
the three Indian chiefs had sat when they
stopped to see my father on their way to
Washington. These warriors were in state
dress, their faces painted in scarlet streaks;
they wore crowns of eagle feathers and robes
embroidered with beads and quills. They
were live horrors to remember for years,
and to shiver over when you were in bed and
the candles were out and you pulled the
clothes over your head.

She urged us to come and welcome them
and not to be outdone in good-breeding by
savages. So we went into the room and sat
on a row of chairs, stiff with terror when they
laughed and grunted "papoose." One of us
even carried a plate of our own jumbles to
them, and the big warrior dumped cakes,
plate and all, into the corner of his robe and
carried them away. When they were going
they turned on the threshold and the great

chief made a farewell speech. The meaning
of that oration always remained a family
mystery. Had he pronounced a curse or a
blessing on us? Even at this late day I
should really like to know what he did
say.

Then there was that green field with its
old trees at the right of the house in which
- Something - had wailed and made moans
the night when one of us lay dead. The
night was clear, the moon being full. Every
one of the family heard the strange sobbing
and cries. But there was no living thing in
the field, - nothing but the voice. No stranger
not of our blood heard it.

But this we never talked of.

But of all the mysteries in that house the
most real was Monsieur Jean Crapeaud.

There was a narrow high closet cut into
the side of the dining-room chimney, of
which the door was always kept locked.
There were six shelves in it. On the lower
three were medicines, almanacs, all the odds
and ends of an orderly housekeeper's treasures;
then came two shelves, empty, because

they were too high for even grown folks to
reach. And on the dark upper shelf which
nobody could touch even by standing on the
highest chair dwelt Monsieur Crapeaud.

I don't know who first told us of him or
his history. We seemed to have known him
always. He was an old nobleman, and had
been driven out of France by Napoleon.
Every day now he went forth for adventures.
We were sure that there was no place in the
world where fighting was going on that Monsieur
Jean would not be found, in full armor,
mounted on a gray steed, carrying a drawn
sword and a banner blazoned with the lilies
of France. But at night he always came
home to his quarters on the top shelf. That
was, of course, only the entrance to his
citadel. Who could tell how many gilded salons
and high towers and dungeons for his
enemies he had there, back of the chimney?
He was, we believed, but twelve inches high,
and we saw no difficulty in his entertaining
many guests in his small quarters. Naturally,
the size of these nobles of France - émigrés - would have shrunken with their fortunes.

Barbara, our nurse, boasted that she had
often seen them, and described them as
perpetually busy with eating frogs' legs and
smoking corn-cob pipes. We said nothing,
but secretly we did not believe Barbara's
story. That statement about cob pipes such
as the negroes smoked lacked common-sense.
We could not be taken in by it.

When we had anything especially good to
eat, such as taffy or black cake, we would
throw bits of it up to the upper shelf, and
when the evening readings touched on wars
or deeds of derring-do, we opened the closet
door that Monsieur Jean might hear. I
remember that in the midst of the great
tournament in "Ivanhoe" somebody gasped in a
whisper, "Maybe he was there!" The idea
was so tremendous that we had to stop reading
that night to think it over.

Nobody had ever seen Jean, and there was
only one person in the house to whom he
would speak. It was very seldom that we could
persuade this friend of the exiled nobleman to
seek an audience. When he consented, how
our hearts throbbed and our feet grew cold as

he would rise, lay down his cigar, and gravely
unlock the closet door.

Three little taps. "Monsieur!"

Silence. Other taps. "Monsieur, will you
permit the children to bid you good-evening?"

"Oui - oui! " in a shrill little voice, thin
and sharp as the stab of a penknife. It came
from the closet, from the floor, from the open
window, and our blood ran cold as we listened.

"What would they ask of poor Jean
Crapeaud?"

"Go on. Speak!" the interpreter would say,
nodding solemnly to us.

That was the awful moment!

Usually the boldest boy would gasp, "Where
did you fight to-day, General?"

Sometimes the answer was "With the Indians,"
or "Against the Turks," or, most blood-curdling
of all, "In Africa, with lions." But he
always quickly added: "I am tired now with
the fight. I go to sleep. Bon soir, mes enfants"
- the shrill pipe of a voice retreating up and
up into the air.

"Bon soir, Monsieur," we would shout in
chorus. Oh, the fearful joy and relief as the

last thin "Adieu" died out and the interpreter
locked the door, invariably coughing violently.

I see now that the village was a picturesque
old place. On a bluff by the river were the ruins
of the fort in which the first settlers took shelter
from the Indians. One of these first settlers
was still living, long past eighty, and each
year used to give a ball in his barnlike house,
when he would appear in an old Continental
uniform and bare feet. The descendants of
these old hunters and surveyors then made up
the rich class of most of the settlements. The
pay of a surveyor in Washington's day usually
was as much land as he could ride around in
a given time. During the first century land
appreciated rapidly in value. Many of the most
influential families in the South and Middle
West to-day might adopt a galloping pony as
their crest with accuracy.

In some of our old houses lived quiet folk,
who frowned upon balls and card parties.
In each of their households were a few slaves,
some family portraits and plate, a shelf or two
of Latin and English classics - and very little
money. The owners stood as serenely secure

on their pedigree as though they traced their
blood back through nobles of Castile for fifty
generations. They had a fine simplicity and
gentleness of speech which I remember as
I do songs heard in my childhood. Father
Vaughan, the Catholic priest, was one of them,
and Doctor Morris, the old Episcopal minister,
who christened and married and buried us
all - was another. The two men used to meet
sometimes in our house, but they were formal
and stately to each other as to nobody else, and
neither man ever spoke of religion when the
other was by.

In the largest of the old houses lived Colonel
Richard Stuart. The colonel was the only man
I ever saw who wore knee breeches and a queue.
Mistress Stuart, too, when she came to drink
tea with us, wore a velvet gown with ruby buttons,
and a lawn turban folded above her whiter
hair. They were a most simple-minded, gentle
old couple, and, being childless, were happy
when we visited them, and they could stuff us
with plum-cake and syllabub. Yet we always
felt that they were not quite real human beings,
but had come down from that far-off age where

everything was old, where George Washington
was the father of his country and Elijah was
carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot.

Suddenly a mysterious disaster befell the old
people. It never was explained to us. Even
now I can but guess at the facts.

There was in the village a certain Squire
Hiram McCall, our one man of business.
The town was proud of him. We children
used to hear men boast that "Hiram was
a financier known from New York to St.
Louis." "Hiram could hold his own on any
exchange in the country." He was a loud-voiced,
hook-nosed, keen-eyed man. We knew
that he had a Bank and Capital. We used to
hear him bragging on the street corners of
his plans to make his fellow citizens rich. He
never spoke to us, but would stumble over us
and push us out of his way.

One day the whole town whispered together
as at a funeral. Many of the women
cried. We listened, of course, wherever we
could. Some of the men we found "had gone
on McCall's paper" - whatever that might
be - "and were ruined. But the ruin of old

We hurried at once to the Stuart place
and peeped through the fence. What was
ruin? Were our old friends dead? No, there
they were on the porch, and my mother was
with them. Her face was pale and her eyes
burned. She was urging them to take the
benefit of some bankrupt law which Henry
Clay had made for the help of poor debtors.

"Are you to starve in your old age," we
heard her say, "to pay the debts of that
villain?"

"I signed my name. I gave my word," was
all that the old man said.

We thought it wiser to go home. She
might look at the fence. But we were satisfied.
If she and Henry Clay had taken the
matter in hand it was all right.

There is a blur of time. Then came a day
of horror. The Stuarts had nothing. The
old man gave up houses, money, land - all;
there was a terrible rumor that even the
velvet gowns and ruby buttons were sent to
Philadelphia and sold.

The story was told to us a hundred times.
"You must understand," she said, the tears
in her eyes. "The Colonel is penniless and
homeless. But he has kept his honor!" She
urged us to take this thing to heart and when
we were grown up to go and do likewise.

I don't think the lesson struck home.
Honor, with no house, nor plum-cake, nor
knee-breeches, looks mean and cold when
one is nine years old. Later we heard that
the Colonel had asked for, and been given,
the post of toll-gate keeper on the turnpike,
and was actually there, taking the tolls.

For years after that, on every fair Sunday
afternoon we were dressed and taken to the
toll-house to "pay our respects." There was
always a certain solemnity in the visit, something
like a presentation at court. The whole
town delighted to honor the old people. You
always found some of their friends on the
vine-covered little porch, where Mistress
Stuart sat in her soft gray gown. There was
no lawn turban now to hide her white hair.
But the Colonel still wore his knee-breeches
and queue. This comforted us greatly. The

tollgate was on a lonely mountain road.
Hours might pass before a wagon or horseman
would be seen coming up out of the fog.
But then it was a fine sight to see the Colonel
lay down his pipe, step solemnly out on the
road, and taking off his hat pass the time of
day with the traveler, while the "levy" or
"fip" was handed to him.

His story was known throughout that part
of Virginia and great reverence was shown
by all passers-by to the old gate-keeper.

Another figure belonging to our first days
in the world was "Knocky-luft." I heard,
forty years later, that her real name was
Cathy Warren, and that long before I was
born she had come from County Cork with
her boy Jim to seek their fortune here. Jim
went on to the West and his mother waited
in our village for him to come back with the
fortune. I remember her chubby face and blue
eyes often bent greedily over some new gown
or hat of my mother's. "Ah-h!" she would
mutter, with breathless delight. "I do be
thinkin' Jim would be cravin' the like for
his old Knocky-luft when he comes back

Jim wrote one day that he was "pushin' on
to the Rockies and would write again when
he came back."

Long before our childhood Knocky was
waiting for that letter. Still waiting, she grew,
as the years went by, into a lean, yellow old
woman, with a red nose and hungry, frightened
eyes. Every day she stopped at the
house on her way down the street.

"Where are you going, Knocky?" we always
cried.

"To the po - stoffis, children," she would
say, with dignity. "There'll be a letter to-day
from my son James, I'm thinkin'."

We used to watch for her at the garden
gate as she crept back again, to comfort her
with a plate of good things saved from the
midday meal. If we could show her, too, a
gay gown or bit of finery the cure was complete.
She would turn it over and over eagerly
shaking her head, muttering: "I doubt I'm
too old - I don't want to be redickelous. But
Jim 'll be havin' his own way! He allays

called me his pretty Knock." Then she would
go away, cheerfully calling out that we would
see her in the morning.

As years went by she grew more lean and
gray and silent. At last she gave up work
altogether. Nobody dared to offer her alms. I
remember the shudder that went through the
family when we heard that she had left her
snug little room and was living in a hut on
the Commons. We knew now that she had
given up hope and had gone out there to die.

The Commons was the plague spot of the
village, a collection of wretched cabins
tenanted by drunken free negroes and Irish.
Among its other horrors were goats and jimson
weeds and a foul pond covered with yellow
slime.

Knocky-luft found shelter in one of these
hovels. Never by a word did she hint that
her hope was gone, or that she had lost faith
in Jim.

Every morning she crept down to the post-office
and back again. There was a certain
drunken old hag known in the village as
Widdy Kate, who sometimes followed her

with jeers, desiring to know whether "her
ladyship's son was coming to-day in his
charyut an' six?"

Knocky took refuge from her in our garden
one day. "To think, childher," she cried,
"that I've sunk down to livin' in the same
house wid Widdy Kate! Only she has the
big room an' I hev the kitchen!"

How could we comfort such misery as that?
It was raining. We dragged her into the
house and showed her my new frock of nankin
embroidered in linen floss. That was
comforting, and when we reached the pantry and
displayed a row of smoking mince pies -
Knocky was laughing.

It was Thanksgiving Day.

We tried to make this clear to Knocky,
with the pies, real and smoking, in sight. But
she grew restless again.

"What for shud I be thankin' God?" she
cried. "Christmas I know, an' the battle of
N-Yorleens, an' the Fourth of July I know.
But I can't be givin' thanks - I'll go home,
childher. No, I want no dinner."

to hold her back, but she shook us off and
went down the street under the dripping trees
again, back to her home with Kate. We were
still, I remember, at the window looking
miserably out at the rain when my mother came
up the path. She was very pale and she held
something white in her hand.

"Is Knocky here?" she said. "It is the
letter from Jim."

"Jim" came that afternoon. He was a stout,
oldish man, with a worn face but kind eyes.
He was handsomely dressed, and stated to
my father that he had grown rich in the
West and had come to take his mother home.
"I'll make her happy!" he said. Why he
had not come before I do not know to this
day.

Feeling that the Commons was the centre
of public interest, we found our way there in
the afternoon, braving the terrors of Widdy
Kate and the butting billy-goats. Knocky
saw us far off. "Come in, childher!" she
called. "Come in. It's Jim! I mean it's
my son, Mr." -

frightened, uncertain. He stroked her hand
gently, humoring her like a baby.

"Yes, it's Jim. I came a little while ago,
you know, mother."

Knocky started up. "Look at my gown,
childher! Silk, d' ye see, as ud stan' alone!
Jim had it made up in the latest fashion.
An' the lace in the bosom, d' ye see? An'
flowin' sleeves! An' the goold watch!"

"I thought she'd be pleased," he said
awkwardly, looking at us.

"I'll tell ye what'll plaze me!" she cried
shrilly. "If you'll go out I'll put them all on.
An' Jim'll get a carriage - an open phayton
like a charyut an' two horses an' we'll drive
past Widdy Kate's dure through the streets to
the Travelers' Inn, an' we'll take dinner there!"

"Very well, mother," said her son, watching
her uneasily.

"You've got enough money? None but
rich folks can dine at the Travelers' Inn.
They drink wine for dinner. Can we have
wine? An' you'll drive slow through the
streets. Past the po - stoffis! I want to stop
an' tell them that my letter's come!"

Jim came out with us and shut the door.
We took time to notice that he looked
white and sick and that Widdy Kate was
waiting with all the other neighbors at the
pond, and then we scurried home to tell the
news.

An hour later we saw the phaeton making
its triumphal way down the street. The sun
had come out and shone on the wet trees.

Suddenly the horses stopped. Jim jumped
out of the phaeton and lifted Knocky-luft in
his arms. He carried her into a house.

"She is not well!" he cried. "Where is a
doctor!"

In a minute she was lying on a couch
and they were rubbing her hands, and I was
running for old Doctor Tanner, whose shop
(with the terrible skeleton) was at the back
of our garden.

Then everybody knew and came. When
they saw Knocky the men took off their hats
and the women cried and went out again.
Doctor Morris, our old minister, came up the
path, thinking that he was needed, but seeing
who it was he ran to find Father Vaughan.

II.
BOSTON IN THE SIXTIES

IN the garden of our old
house there were
some huge cherry-trees, with low growing
branches, and in one of them our nurse,
Barbara, having an architectural turn of mind,
once built me a house. Really, even now, old
as I am, and after I have seen St. James's
and the Vatican, I can't imagine any house
as satisfactory as Barbara's.

You went up as far as you could by a
ladder to the dizzy height of twelve feet, and
then you kicked the ladder down and climbed
on, up and up, breathless with terror and
triumph, and - there it was. All your own.
Not a boy had ever heard of it. There was a
plank nailed in for the floor and another for
a seat, and there was a secret box with a lid.
You could hide your baby in that box, if
there were danger of an attack by the
Indians, or you could store your provisions in

it in case you had been on a long journey in
the wilderness, and had gained this refuge
from the wolves in the jungle of currant
bushes below. All around you, above and
below, were the thick wall of green leaves
and the red cherries. They were useful, in
case there was danger of starving when the
siege by the redskins or wild beasts lasted
long.

After I had grown old enough to be
ashamed of my dolls, or of looking for wolves
in the currant bushes; I used to carry my two
or three books up to the tree-house. There
were but two or three books then for children;
no magazines, nor Kiplings, nor Stevensons,
nor any of the army of cheery storytellers
who beset the young people to-day;
only Bunyan and Miss Edgeworth and Sir
Walter.

Still, when Apollyon roared in the celery
pits below, and Mercy and Christiana sat
under the locust-trees, and the tents and
glittering legions of the crusaders stretched
away to the hills, I don't know that any girl
now, in a proper modern house, has better

One day I climbed up with a new book,
the first cheap book, by the way, that I ever
saw. It was in two volumes; the cover was
of yellow paper and the name was "Moral
Tales." The tales, for the most part, were
thin and cheap as the paper; they commanded
no enchanted company, bad or good,
into the cherry-tree.

But among them were two or three
unsigned stories which I read over so often
that I almost know every line of them by
heart now. One was a story told by a
town-pump, and another the account of the
rambles of a little girl like myself, and still
another a description of a Sunday morning
in a quiet town like our sleepy village. There
was no talk of enchantment in them. But
in these papers the commonplace folk and
things which I saw every day took on a sudden
mystery and charm, and, for the first time,
I found that they, too, belonged to the magic
world of knights and pilgrims and fiends.

he was, had probably stolen these anonymous
papers from the annuals in which they had
appeared. Nobody called him to account.
Their author was then, as he tells us
somewhere, the "obscurest man of letters in
America."

Years afterward, when he was known as
the greatest of living romancers, I opened
his "Twice-Told Tales" and found there my
old friends with a shock of delight as keen
as if I had met one of my own kinsfolk in the
streets of a foreign city. In the first heat of
my discovery I wrote to Mr. Hawthorne and
told him about Barbara's house and of what
he had done for the child who used to hide
there. The little story, coming from the
backwoods, touched his fancy, I suppose, for
I presently received a note from him saying
that he was then at Washington, and was
coming on to Harper's Ferry, where John
Brown had died, and still farther to see the
cherry-trees and - me.

Me.

Well, I suppose Esther felt a little in that
way when the king's sceptre touched her.

I wish he had come to the old town. It
would have seemed a different place forever
after to many people. But we were in the
midst of the Civil War, and the western end
of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was seized
just then by the Confederates, and he turned
back.

A year later I saw him. It was during my
first visit to New England, at the time when
certain men and women were earning for
Boston its claim to be called the modern
Athens.

I wish I could summon these memorable
ghosts before you as I saw them then and
afterward. To the eyes of an observer,
belonging to the commonplace world, they did
not appear precisely as they do in the
portraits drawn of them for posterity by their
companions, the other Areopagites, who
walked and talked with them apart - always
apart from humanity.

That was the first
peculiarity which struck
an outsider in Emerson, Hawthorne, and the
other members of the "Atlantic" coterie; that
while they thought they were guiding the

real world, they stood quite outside of it, and
never would see it as it was.

For instance, during the
Civil War, they
had much to say of it, and all used the same
strained high note of exaltation. It was to
them "only the shining track," as Lowell
calls it, where

. . . "heroes mustered in a gleaming row,
Beautiful evermore, and with the rays
Of morn on their white shields of expectation."

These heroes were their
bravest and their
best, gone to die for the slave or for their
country. They were "the army" to them.

I remember listening
during one long
summer morning to Louisa Alcott's father as
he chanted pæans to the war, the "armed
angel which was wakening the nation to a
lofty life unknown before."

We were in the little parlor of the Wayside,
Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr.
Alcott stood in front of the fireplace, his long
gray hair streaming over his collar, his pale
eyes turning quickly from one listener to
another to hold them quiet, his hands waving
to keep time with the orotund sentences

which had a stale, familiar ring as if often
repeated before. Mr. Emerson stood listening,
his head sunk on his breast, with profound
submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat
astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back,
his chin dropped on them, and his laughing,
sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.

I had just come up from the border where
I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings
of it; the political jobbery in Union and
Confederate camps; the malignant personal
hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted
by burning homes and outraged women; the
chances in it, well improved on both sides,
for brutish men to grow more brutish, and
for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into
thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel
with a mission, but she has the personal habits
of the slums. This would-be seer who was
talking of it, and the real seer who listened,
knew no more of war as it was, than I had
done in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of
bannered legions of crusaders debouching in
the misty fields.

lazily to his feet, and said quietly: "We cannot
see that thing at so long a range. Let
us go to dinner," and Mr. Alcott suddenly
checked the droning flow of his prophecy and
quickly led the way to the dining-room.

Early that morning when his lank, gray
figure had first appeared at the gate, Mr.
Hawthorne said: "Here comes the Sage of
Concord. He is anxious to know what kind
of human beings come up from the back hills
in Virginia. Now I will tell you," his eyes
gleaming with fun, "what he will talk to you
about. Pears. Yes. You may begin at Plato
or the day's news, and he will come around to
pears. He is now convinced that a vegetable
diet affects both the body and soul, and that
pears exercise a more direct and ennobling
influence on us than any other vegetable or
fruit. Wait. You'll hear presently."

When we went in to dinner, therefore, I
was surprised to see the sage eat heartily of
the fine sirloin of beef set before us. But
with the dessert he began to advocate a vegetable
diet and at last announced the spiritual
influence of pears, to the great delight of his

host, who laughed like a boy and was humored
like one by the gentle old man.

Whether Alcott, Emerson, and their disciples
discussed pears or the war, their views
gave you the same sense of unreality, of having
been taken, as Hawthorne said, at too
long a range. You heard much sound philosophy
and many sublime guesses at the eternal
verities; in fact, never were the eternal
verities so dissected and pawed over and
turned inside out as they were about that
time, in Boston, by Margaret Fuller and her
successors. But the discussion left you with
a vague, uneasy sense that something was
lacking, some back-bone of fact. Their theories
were like beautiful bubbles blown from
a child's pipe, floating overhead, with queer
reflections on them of sky and earth and
human beings, all in a glow of fairy color and
all a little distorted.

Mr. Alcott once showed me an arbor which
he had built with great pains and skill for
Mr. Emerson to "do his thinking in." It was
made of unbarked saplings and boughs, a tiny
round temple, two storied, with chambers in

which were seats, a desk, etc., all very artistic
and complete, except that he had forgotten
to make any door. You could look at it and
admire it, but nobody could go in or use it.
It seemed to me a fitting symbol for this
guild of prophets and their scheme of life.

Mr. Alcott at that time was their oracle,
appointed and held in authority by Emerson
alone. His faith in the old man was so
sincere and simple that it was almost painful
to see it.

He once told me, "I asked Alcott the
other day what he would do when he came to
the gate, and St. Peter demanded his ticket.
'What have you to show to justify your right
to live?' I said. 'Where is your book, your
picture? You have done nothing in the
world.' 'No,' he said, 'but somewhere on a
hill up there will be Plato and Paul and
Socrates talking, and they will say: "Send
Alcott over here, we want him with us." '
And," said Emerson, gravely shaking his
head, "he was right! Alcott was right."

Mr. Alcott was a tall, awkward, kindly old
man, absolutely ignorant of the world, but

with an obstinate faith in himself which
would have befitted a pagan god. Hearing
that I was from Virginia, he told me that he
owed his education wholly to Virginian planters.
He had traveled in his youth as a peddler
through the State, and finding how eager he
was to learn they would keep him for days
in their houses, turning him loose in their
libraries.

His own library was full of folios of his
manuscripts. He had covered miles of paper
with his inspirations, but when I first knew
him no publisher had ever put a line of them
into print. His house was bleak and bitter
cold with poverty, his wife had always worked
hard to feed him and his children. In any
other town he would have been more respected
if he had tried to put his poor carpentering
skill to use to support them. But
the homelier virtues were not, apparently, in
vogue in Concord.

During my first visit to Boston in 1862, I
saw at an evening reception a tall, thin young
woman standing alone in a corner. She was
plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant

air with which the woman whose youth is
slipping away is apt to face the world which
has offered no place to her. Presently she
came up to me.

"These people may say pleasant things to
you," she said abruptly; "but not one of them
would have gone to Concord and back
to see you, as I did to-day. I went for this
gown. It's the only decent one I have. I'm
very poor;" and in the next breath she
contrived to tell me that she had once taken a
place as "second girl." "My name," she
added, "is Louisa Alcott."

Now, although we had never met, Louisa
Alcott had shown me great kindness in the
winter just past, sacrificing a whole day to a
tedious work which was to give me pleasure
at a time when every hour counted largely
to her in her desperate struggle to keep her
family from want. The little act was so
considerate and fine, that I am still grateful for
it, now when I am an old woman, and Louisa
Alcott has long been dead. It was as natural
for her to do such things as for a
pomegranate-tree to bear fruit.

Before I met her I had known many women
and girls who were fighting with poverty
and loneliness, wondering why God had sent
them into a life where apparently there was
no place for them, but never one so big and
generous in soul as this one in her poor
scant best gown, the "claret-colored merino,"
which she tells of with such triumph in her
diary. Amid her grim surroundings, she had
the gracious instincts of a queen. It was her
delight to give, to feed living creatures, to
make them happy in body and soul.

She would so welcome you in her home to
a butterless baked potato and a glass of milk
that you would never forget the delicious
feast. Or, if she had no potato or milk to
offer, she would take you through the woods
to the river, and tell you old legends of colony
times, and be so witty and kind in the doing
of it that the day would stand out in your
memory ever after, differing from all other
days, brimful of pleasure and comfort.

With this summer, however, the darkest
hour of her life passed. A few months after I
saw her she went as a nurse into the war,

and soon after wrote her "Hospital Sketches."
Then she found her work and place in the
world.

Years afterward she came to the city where
I was living and I hurried to meet her. The
lean, eager, defiant girl was gone, and instead,
there came to greet me a large, portly,
middle-aged woman, richly dressed. Everything
about her, from her shrewd, calm eyes to
the rustle of her satin gown told of assured
success.

Yet I am sure fame and success counted
for nothing with her except for the material
aid which they enabled her to give to a few
men and women whom she loved. She would
have ground her bones to make their bread.
Louisa Alcott wrote books which were true
and fine, but she never imagined a life as
noble as her own.

The altar for human sacrifices still stands
and smokes in this Christian day of the world,
and God apparently does not reject its
offerings.

Of the group of famous people in Concord
in 1862, Mr. Emerson was best known to the

country at large. He was the typical Yankee
in appearance. The tall, gaunt man, with the
watchful, patient face and slightly dazed eyes,
his hands clasped behind his back, that came
slowly down the shady village street toward
the Wayside that summer day, was Uncle
Sam himself in ill-fitting brown clothes. I
often have wondered that none of his biographers
have noticed the likeness. Voice and
look and manner were full of the most
exquisite courtesy, yet I doubt whether he was
conscious of his courtesy or meant to be
deferential. Emerson, first of all, was a student
of man, an explorer into the dim, obscure
regions of human intelligence. He studied souls
as a philologist does words, or an entomologist
beetles. He approached each man with
bent head and eager eyes. "What new thing
shall I find here?" they said.

I went to Concord, a young woman from
the backwoods, firm in the belief that Emerson
was the first of living men. He was the
modern Moses who had talked with God
apart and could interpret Him to us.

at the Wayside my body literally grew stiff
and my tongue dry with awe. And in ten
minutes I was telling him all that I had seen
of the war, the words tumbling over each
other, so convinced was I of his eagerness to
hear. He was eager. If Edison had been
there he would have been just as eager to
wrench out of him the secret of electricity, or
if it had been a freed slave he would have
compelled him to show the scars on his back
and lay bare his rejoicing, ignorant, half-animal
soul, and an hour later he would have
forgotten that Edison or the negro or I were
in the world - having taken from each what
he wanted.

Naturally Mr. Emerson valued the abnormal
freaks among human souls most highly,
just as the unclassable word and the mongrel
beetle are dearest to the grammarian or the
naturalist. The only man to whose authority
he bowed was Alcott, the vague, would-be
prophet, whose ravings he did not pretend to
fathom. He apparently shared in the popular
belief that eccentricity was a sign of
genius.

He said to me suddenly once, "I wish
Thoreau had not died before you came. He
was an interesting study."

"Why?" I asked.

"Why? Thoreau?" He hesitated, thinking,
going apparently to the bottom of the
matter, and said presently: "Henry often
reminded me of an animal in human form.
He had the eye of a bird, the scent of a dog,
the most acute, delicate intelligence - but
no soul. No," he repeated, shaking his head
with decision, "Henry could not have had a
human soul."

His own perception of character was an
intuition. He felt a fine trait as he would a
fine strain of music. Coming once to Philadelphia,
he said, almost as soon as he entered
the house, "So Philip Randolph has gone!
That man had the sweetest moral nature I
ever knew. There never was a man so lacking
in self-consciousness. The other day I
saw in the London 'Times' that 'the American,
Randolph, one of the three greatest
chess players in the world was dead.' I knew
Philip intimately since he was a boy, and I

never heard him mention the game. I did
not even know that he played it. How fine
that was!" he said, walking up and down the
room. "How fine that was!"

Emerson himself was as little likely to
parade his merits as Randolph, but not from
any lack of self-appreciation. On the
contrary, his interest in his Ego was so
dominant that it probably never occurred to him
to ask what others thought of him. He took
from each man his drop of stored honey,
and after that the man counted for no more
to him than any other robbed bee. I do not
think that even the worship which his
disciples gave him interested him enough to
either amuse or annoy him.

It was worship. No such homage has ever
been paid to any American. His teaching
influenced at once the trend of thought here
and in England; the strongest men then
living became promptly his disciples or his
active antagonists.

But outside of this central circle of scholars
and original thinkers, there were vast outlying
provinces of intelligence where he reigned

absolutely as does the unseen Grand Llama
over his adoring votaries. New England then
swarmed with weak-brained, imitative folk
who had studied books with more or less
zeal, and who knew nothing of actual life.
They were suffering under the curse of an
education which they could not use; they
were the lean, underfed men and women of
villages and farms, who were trained enough
to be lawyers and teachers in their
communities, but who actually were cobblers,
mill-hands, or tailoresses. They had revolted
from Puritanism, not to enter any other live
church, but to fall into a dull disgust, a
nausea with all religion. To them came this
new prophet with his discovery of the God
within themselves. They hailed it with acclamation.
The new dialect of the Transcendentalist
was easily learned. They talked it as
correctly as the Chinaman does his pigeon
English. Up to the old gray house among
the pines in Concord they went - hordes of
wild-eyed Harvard undergraduates and lean,
underpaid working-women, each with a disease
of soul to be cured by the new Healer.

It is quite impossible to give to the present
generation an idea of the devout faith of
these people. Keen-witted and scholarly as
some of them were, it was as absolute as that
of the poor Irishman tramping over the bogs
in Munster to cure his ailments by a drink
of the water of a holy well.

Outside of these circles of disciples there
was then throughout the country a certain
vague pride in Emerson as an American
prophet. We were in the first flush of our
triumph in the beginnings of a national
literature. We talked much of it. Irving,
Prescott, and Longfellow had been English, we
said, but these new men - Holmes and
Lowell and Hawthorne - were our own, the
indigenous growth of the soil. In the West
and South there was no definite idea as to
what truth this Concord man had brought
into the world. But in any case it was
American truth and not English. Emerson's
popularity, therefore, outside of New
England was wide, but vague and impersonal.

Everybody who cared for books, whether
in New York clubs, California ranches, or
Pennsylvania farms, loved and laughed with
"the little doctor," as he was fondly called.
They discussed his queer ways and quoted
his last jokes as if he had been the autocrat
at their own breakfast-table that morning.
His output of occasional verses was enormous
and constant. The present generation,
probably, regard most of them as paste
jewels, but they shone for us, the purest of
gems. He was literally the autocrat of the
young men and women of his time. He
opened the depths of their own hearts to
them as nobody else had done, and they ran
to him to pour out their secrets. Letters -
hundreds in a day - rained down on him
with confidences, tragic, pathetic, and ridiculous,
but all true. The little man was alive
with magnetism; it fired his feeblest verse,
and drew many men and all women to him.

Physically, he was a very small man,
holding himself stiffly erect - his face insignificant
as his figure, except for a long, obstinate
upper lip ("left to me," he said one day, "by

some ill-conditioned great-grandmother"), and
eyes full of a wonderful fire and sympathy.
No one on whom Dr. Holmes had once looked
with interest ever forgot the look - or him.
He attracted all kinds of people as a brilliant,
excitable child would attract them. But nobody,
I suspect, ever succeeded in being familiar
with him.

Americans at that time seldom talked of
distinction of class or descent. You were only
truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a
grandfather and were glad of it. But the Autocrat
was patrician enough to represent the descent
of a daimio, with two thousand years of
ancestry behind him. He was the finest fruit of
that Brahmin order of New England which
he first had classified and christened. He had
too keen an appreciation of genius not to
recognize his own. He enjoyed his work as
much as his most fervent admirers, and openly
enjoyed, too, their applause. I remember one
evening that he quoted one of his poems, and
I was forced stupidly to acknowledge that I
did not know it. He fairly jumped to the
book-cases, took out the volume and read the

verses, standing in the middle of the room,
his voice trembling, his whole body thrilling
with their meaning.

"There!" he cried at the end, his eyes
flashing, "could anybody have said that better?
Ah-h!" with a long, indrawn breath of delight
as he put the book back.

He had the fervor, the irritability, the
tenderness of a woman, and her whimsical
fancies, too. He was, unlike women, eager to help
you out with your unreasonable whims. One
day I happened to confess to a liking for old
graveyards and the strange bits of human history
to be found or guessed at in them. The
result was that he became my cicerone the
next day to Mount Auburn. It was an odd
bit of luck to fall to a young woman from the
hills that she should have the Autocrat, to
whom the whole country was paying homage,
all to herself for a whole summer morning.
He took me to none of the costly monuments,
nor graves of famous folk, but wandered here
and there among the trees, his hands clasped
behind him, stopping now and then at a green
mound, while he told me curious fragments

of the life which was ended below. He
mentioned no names - they would have meant
nothing to me if he had - but he wrested the
secret meaning out of each life, pouncing on
it, holding it up with a certain racy enjoyment
in his own astuteness. It was a marvelous
monologue, full of keen wit and delicate
sympathy and acrid shrewdness. I must confess
that I think he forgot the country and its
homage and me that morning, and talked simply
for his own pleasure in his own pathos and
fun, just as a woman might take out her jewels
when she was alone, to hold up the glittering
strings and take delight in their shining. Once,
I remember, he halted by a magnificent shaft
and read the bead roll of the virtues of the
man who lay beneath: "A devoted husband,
a tender father, a noble citizen - dying
triumphant in the Christian faith."

"Now this dead man," he said, in a high,
rasping tone, "was a prize fighter, a drunkard,
and a thief. He beat his wife. But she puts
up this stone. He had money!"

Then he hurried me across the slopes to an
obscure corner where a grave was hidden by

high, wild grasses. He knelt and parted the
long branches. Under them was a little
headstone with the initials "M. H.," and
underneath the verse: -

She lived unknown and
few could know
When Mary ceased to be,
But she is gone, and Oh!
The difference to me!

"Do you see
this?" he asked, in a whisper.

"Do you know who she
was?" I asked.

"No, I would n't try
to find out. I'd like
to know, but I could n't uncover that grave.
No, no! I could n't do that."

He put back the leaves reverently so as
to hide the stone again and rose, and as he
turned away I saw that the tears stood in his
eyes.

As we drove home he said: "I believe that
I know every grave in the old villages within
a radius of thirty miles from Boston. I search
out the histories of these forgotten folk in
records and traditions, and sometimes I find
strange things - oh, very strange things!
When I have found out all about them they

seem like my own friends, lying there
forgotten. But I know them! And every spring,
as soon as the grass begins to come up, I
go my rounds to visit them and see how my
dead men do!"

But with all his whims Dr. Holmes was no
unpractical dreamer like his friends in
Concord. He was far in advance of his time in
certain shrewd, practical plans for the
bettering of the conditions of American life.

One of his hobbies was a belief in a hobby
as an escape valve in the over-heated,
over-driven career of a brain worker.

The doctrine was almost new then. The
pace of life was as yet tranquil and moderate
compared to the present headlong American
race. But the doctor foresaw what was
coming - both the danger and its remedy.

His camera and violin were two of his
own doors of escape from work and worry.
Under his library table, too, was a little box,
furnished with a jig-saw, lathe, etc. It ran in
and out on grooves, like a car on a railway.
He showed it one day with triumph.

my friends know about it. People think I
am shut in here, hard at work, writing poetry
or lectures. And I am making jim-cracks.
But if any of the dunces make their way in,
I give it a shove - so! Away it goes under
the table and I am discovered - Poet or
Professor, in character - pen in hand!" and
he chuckled like a naughty boy over his
successful trick.

Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson, and George
Ticknor, all chiefs of differing literary clans,
formed a fraternity then in New England
which never since has found its parallel in
America.

There can be no doubt that their success
as individuals or as a body in influencing
American thought was largely due to their
friend and neighbor, James T. Fields, the
shrewdest of publishers and kindest of men.
He was the wire that conducted the lightning
so that it never struck amiss.

His little house in Charles Street, with the
pretty garden sloping to the river, was then
the shelter to which hied all wandering men
of letters, from Thackeray and Dickens down

They were wisely counseled and sent upon
the right path, but not until they had been
warmed and fed in body and mind. Mr. Fields
was a keen man of business, but he had a
kindly, hospitable soul.

Hawthorne was in the Boston fraternity
but not of it. He was an alien among these
men, not of their kind. He belonged to no
tribe. I am sure that wherever he went during
his whole life, from the grassy streets of
Salem to the docks of Liverpool, on Parisian
boulevards or in the olive groves of Bellosguardo,
he was always a foreigner, different
from his neighbors. He probably never knew
that he was different. He knew and cared
little about Nathaniel Hawthorne, or indeed
about the people around him. The man next
door interested him no more than the man in
Mozambique. He walked through life, talking
and thinking to himself in a language which
we do not understand.

It has happened to me to meet many of
the men of my day whom the world agreed

to call great. I have found that most of these
royalties seem to sink into ordinary citizens
at close approach.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart
of the world, or the foremost captain of his
time, driving a bargain or paring a potato,
just as you would do. You are disappointed
in every word and look from them. You expect
to see the divine light shining through
their talk to the office-boy or the train-man,
and you never catch a glimmer of it; you are
aggrieved because their coats and trousers
have not something of the cut of kingly robes.

Hawthorne only, of them all, always stood
aloof. Even in his own house he was like
Banquo's ghost among the thanes at the
banquet.

There is an old Cornish legend that a
certain tribe of mountain spirits were once
destroyed by the trolls, all except one, who
still wanders through the earth looking for
his own people and never finding them. I
never looked at Hawthorne without remembering
the old story.

built man, gentle and low voiced, with
a sly, elusive humor gleaming sometimes in
his watchful gray eyes. The portrait with
which we all are familiar - a curled barbershop
head - gives no idea of the singular
melancholy charm of his face. There was a
mysterious power in it which I never have
seen elsewhere in picture, statue, or human
being.

Wayside, the home of the Hawthornes in
Concord, was a comfortable little house on a
shady, grassy road. To please his wife he
had built an addition to it, a tower into
which he could climb, locking out the world
below, and underneath, a little parlor, in
whose dainty new furnishings Mrs. Hawthorne
took a womanish delight. Yet, somehow,
gay Brussels rugs and gilded frames
were not the background for the morbid,
silent recluse.

Mrs. Hawthorne, however, made few such
mistakes. She was a soft, affectionate,
feminine little woman, with intuitions subtle
enough to follow her husband into his darkest
moods, but with, too, a cheerful, practical

Yankee "capacity" which fitted her to meet
baker and butcher. Nobody could have been
better fitted to stand between Hawthorne
and the world. She did it effectively. When
I was at Wayside, they had been living there
for two years - ever since their return from
Europe, and I was told that in that time he
had never once been seen on the village
street.

This habit of seclusion was a family trait.
Hawthorne's mother had managed to live
the life of a hermit in busy Salem, and her
sister, meeting a disappointment in early life,
had gone into her chamber, and for more
than twenty years shut herself up from her
kind, and dug into her own soul to find there
what truth and life she could. During the
years in which Nathaniel, then a young
man, lived with these two women, he, too,
chose to be alone, going out of the house
only at night, and finding his food on a plate
left at his locked door. Sometimes weeks
passed during which the three inmates of the
little gray wooden house never saw each
other.

Hawthorne was the product of generations
of solitude and silence. No wonder
that he had the second sight and was
naturalized into the world of ghosts and could
interpret for us their speech.

America may have great poets and novelists,
but she never will have more than one
necromancer.

The natural feeling among healthy,
commonplace people toward the solitary man
was a tender sympathy such as they would
give to a sick child.

"Nathaniel," an old blacksmith in Salem
once said to me, "was queer even as a boy.
He certainly was queer. But you humored
him. You wanted to humor him."

One person, however, had no mind to humor
him. This was Miss Elizabeth Peabody,
Mrs. Hawthorne's sister. She was the mother
of the kindergarten in this country, and
gave to its cause, which seemed to her first
in importance, a long and patient life of
noble self-sacrifice. She was a woman of wide
research and a really fine intelligence, but
she had the discretion of a six-year-old child.

She loved to tell the details of Hawthorne's
courtship of her sister, and of how she
herself had unearthed him from the tomb of the
little gray house in Salem, and "brought him
into Sophia's presence." She still regarded
him as a demi-god, but a demi-god who
required to be fed, tutored, and kept in order.
It was her mission, she felt, to bring him out
from solitudes where he walked apart, to the
broad ways of common sense.

I happened to be present at her grand and
last coup to this end.

One evening I was with Mrs. Hawthorne
in the little parlor when the children brought
in their father. The windows were open, and
we sat in the warm twilight quietly talking
or silent as we chose. Suddenly Miss
Peabody appeared in the doorway. She was a
short, stout little woman, with her white
stockinged feet thrust into slippers, her hoop
skirt swaying from side to side, and her gray
hair flying to the winds.

She lighted the lamp, went out and
brought in more lamps, and then sat down
and waited with an air of stern resolution.

Presently Mr. Emerson and his daughter
appeared, then Louisa Alcott and her father,
then two gray old clergymen who were formally
presented to Mr. Hawthorne, who now
looked about him with terrified dismay. We
saw other figures approaching in the road
outside.

"What does this mean, Elizabeth?" Mrs.
Hawthorne asked aside.

"I did it. I went around and asked a few
people in to meet our friend here. I ordered
some cake and lemonade, too."

Her blue eyes glittered with triumph as
Mrs. Hawthorne turned away. "They've
been here two years," she whispered, "and
nobody has met Mr. Hawthorne. People
talk. It's ridiculous! There's no reason
why Sophia should not go into society. So
I just made an excuse of your visit to bring
them in."

Miss Elizabeth has been for many years
among the sages and saints on the heavenly
hills, but I have not yet quite forgiven her
the misery of that moment.

rustled in a woman who came straight to Mr.
Hawthorne, as a vulture to its prey. I never
heard her name, but I knew her at sight as
the intellectual woman of the village, the
Intelligent Questioner who cows you into idiocy
by her fluent cleverness.

"So delighted to meet you at last!" she
said, seating herself beside him. "I have
always admired your books, Mr. Hawthorne.
I was one of the very first to recognize your
power. And now I want you to tell me
about your methods of work. I want to hear
all about it."

But at that moment his wife came up and said
that he was wanted outside, and he escaped.
A few moments later I heard his steps on the
floor overhead, and knew that he was safe in
the tower for the night.

. . . . . . . .

He did not hold me guilty in the matter, for
the next morning he joined his wife and me in
a walk through the fields. We went to the
Old Manse where they had lived when they
were first married, and then wandered on to
the wooded slopes of the Sleepy Hollow Valley

It was a cool morning, with soft mists rolling
up the hills, and flashes between of sudden
sunlight. The air was full of pungent woody
smells, and the undergrowth blushed pink with
blossoms. There was no look of a cemetery
about the place. Here and there, in a shady
nook, was a green hillock like a bed, as if some
tired traveler had chosen a quiet place for
himself and lain down to sleep.

Mr. Hawthorne sat down in the deep grass
and then, clasping his hands about his knees,
looked up laughing.

"Yes," he said, "we New Englanders begin
to enjoy ourselves - when we are dead."

As we walked back the mists gathered and
the day darkened overhead. Hawthorne, who
had been joking like a boy, grew suddenly
silent, and before we reached home the cloud
had settled down again upon him, and his steps
lagged heavily.

Even the faithful woman who kept always
close to his side with her laughing words and
anxious eyes did not know that day how

In a few months he was lying under the
deep grass, at rest, near the very spot where
he sat and laughed, looking up at us.

I left Concord that evening and never saw
him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly,
and then, holding out his hand, said: -

"I am sorry you are going away. It seems
as if we had known you always."

The words were nothing. I suppose he forgot
them and me as he turned into the house.
And yet, because perhaps of the child in the
cherry-tree, and the touch which the Magician
laid upon her, I never have forgotten
them. They seemed to take me, too, for one
moment, into his enchanted country.

Of the many pleasant things which have
come into my life, this was one of the
pleasantest and best.

III.
IN THE FAR SOUTH

BEFORE we came to
Virginia we lived in one
of the Gulf States, in a district given up to
cotton plantations. In the middle of these
plantations, in a wide basin formed by the
sloping hills, lay the village of Big Spring.
Near it was the spring, a huge gush of brown
water which made itself into a creek and
lapped its crooked way through the woods.
The principal house was a store where
everything could be bought, from a plow to stale
sugar-plums, and the pelts brought by the
Indian tribe that still lingered on the other
side of the hills.

Along the grassy road which led from the
store were the forge, the house of the
horse-trader, the shoemaker's cabin, and the tavern,
kept by Ody Peay. No decent traveler had
ever been known to stay overnight in Ody's
dirty, dark chambers. But the foremost men

and the best judges of liquor in the State came
to try his mint juleps and sherry cobblers.
You would hear no better talk in the South
than that which purled lazily along on a rainy
afternoon on Ody's gallery.

This was the village. The woods crept in
year by year as if they wanted to close down
upon it altogether and smother out its torpid
life; live oaks grew in the midst of the streets;
the moss covered the roofs and edged the
huge trough into which the water from the
spring dripped, and about which the sleepy
oxen stood in the hot sunshine and drank
lazily.

Some of the planters who daily rode into
town for a smoke and a gossip at Ody's were
the descendants of good Protestant Irish
families; and others, still Catholic, traced back
their ancestry to French émigrés who had
escaped the guillotine.

The planters were not energetic cotton-growers.
Most of their capital and knowledge
went into their stables, in which were some
of the most famous running horses then in
the country. Their owners traveled every

year with them and a great following of
friends, jockeys, and grooms, to New Orleans
and up to the northern race-courses.

The southern king of the turf, Gray Eagle,
was partly owned by Major Delasco, one of
our neighbors, though Kentucky claimed the
great racer, and was as proud of him as of
any of her sons, Marshall or Clay though he
might be.

When Kentucky was challenged by Louisiana
on the course in 1840, it was Gray Eagle
who was chosen to uphold its honor. The
whole country stood breathless as that race
was run. The Major backed the horse with
every dollar and acre that he owned. Thousands
of Kentuckians risked their whole fortunes
on him, and when it was certain that
he would lose, not a man from that State, to
save himself, would hedge or bet a penny
against him. The ruin of many an old family
dated from that race.

In his old age the great southern champion
was taken by Major Delasco to the course
at Lexington, where his chief triumphs had
been won. When the races were over, the

audience waited in silence while the old horse,
blind and tottering, was led in. He was
stripped; the bugle sounded the start. He
understood. His sightless eyes kindled, his
nostrils quivered as he was led around the
course. Roar after roar of frantic shouts
greeted him; every head was uncovered.
He stepped slowly and proudly, his head high,
his breath coming hard.

He knew that he was the conqueror, and
that these were his friends come to welcome
him. Twice he marched around the track,
and then passed out of sight forever.

"He knows!" the Major said, as he led him
out, patting him with a shaking hand. "He
knows it's the last time. He has bid the
world good-by." The tears ran down over
his huge tobacco-stained jaws as he talked.

Gray Eagle died two days later.

I have often heard my mother describe the
mixed magnificence and squalor of the life
on the plantations among which we lived; the
great one-storied wooden houses built on
piles; the pits of mud below them in which
the pigs wallowed; the masses of crimson

roses heaped high on the roofs, a blaze of
pure and splendid color; the bare floors, not
too often scrubbed; the massive buffets covered
with magnificent plate, much of it cups
and salvers won on the turf.

The women of these families did not lead
the picturesque idle life which their northern
sisters imagined and envied. Much of the
day was spent in weighing provisions or cutting
out clothes for the field hands. They had
few books - an odd volume of poems and
their Bibles, which they read devoutly - and
no amusements but an occasional hot supper,
to which they went in faded gowns of ancient
cut. But their jewels, as a rule, were diamonds
of great purity and value.

In our quiet life afterwards in Virginia, our
sojourn in the far South was remembered as an
uneasy dream. The thick shade of the semi-tropical
forests, the mile-long hedges of roses
through which crawled rattlesnakes and the
deadly upland moccasin, the darting birds
like jewels, the extravagant slovenliness of
both nature and man, the fleas, the ticks, the
chiggers, and countless other creatures that

bite and sting, and through all and over all
the intolerable heat, made up for us children
a strange, enchanted page of the past family
history.

The planters welcomed strangers with ardent
kindness. They served God with the
same fervor. Dancing and card-playing were
regarded as devices of the devil, the southern
"church member" being then, as now,
much more strict in abjuring these carnal
delights than is the descendant of the
Puritan.

While we were in this neighborhood Major
Delasco's wife gave a small supper, after
which there was a carpet dance. On the following
Sunday there was a celebration of the
Holy Communion in the Presbyterian church
of which she was a member. When she went,
according to custom, for a silver token
admitting her to the table it was refused. Early
on Monday morning the Major sent a challenge
to each of the elders and members of
the session, eighteen in all. Most of the men
whom he had challenged were his cronies,
with whom he supped daily, and exchanged

"I may die on the field," he said, "but I
shall have vindicated Maria's honor, thank
God!"

This washing of reputations clean by blood
was going on perpetually.

On the day when my father first arrived
at the village he was passing down the street
when he observed that a gentleman was
following him rapidly. He halted, coming
abreast of him, and, drawing a pistol, pointed
it at his head. Naturally my father started
back.

"Thank you, sir," said the stranger
courteously. "It is the gentleman on the other
side of the street I wish to shoot."

He pulled the trigger, and the gentleman
on the other side fell dead, with the bullet in
his heart. During the next six months more
than thirty men were shot on the same grassy
highway. Every one of these deaths was the
outcome of the creed which rated honor
higher than life - a creed which scarcely has
a place among the motives of any man nowadays.

There was a family whom I shall call
Impey, because that was not their name, and
because they claimed kinship with Sir Elijah
Impey, the judge in India famous as the
murderer of Nuncomar. Some French blood
of a finer strain than that of the English
butcher had some time been mixed in the
race.

One branch of the family ended in an old
man of eighty, his daughter, a widow, his
granddaughter, a delicate girl of sixteen, and
her baby brother.

Many years after we had left the
neighborhood, Judge Mabury, one of the planters,
with his wife, visited us on their way home
from the North. They had much to tell us
of our old friends.

"And Mary Impey?" some one asked at
last.

"Oh, little Mary?" exclaimed Mrs.
Mabury. "She had a very tryin' experience,
poh child! But it all ended right. You know
she lived alone with her grandfather and

little brother, quite remote. She heard one
day that Colonel Dupree had spoken - well,
coarsely of her. I can't go into details. The
remark left a stain on her character. She
heard it in the mohnin', an' she considered
about it. She had no father. Willy was only
seven; thah was nobody but her grandfather,
an' he was imbecile. So she called foh her
pony an' rode into the village, an' stopped at
the tahvern, where the colonel was likely to
be. Some gentlemen she knew were on the
gallery.

" 'Is Colonel Dupree inside?' she said,
very scared to speak out before them all.

"So they called him, and then came around
the horse to talk to Miss Mary.

"When he came out o' the doh, smilin' an'
bowin', she said, 'Colonel, I've been told you
spoke of me yesterday in wohds that I can't
repeat. Thah's no man to come an' ask
about it. What grounds had you foh speaking
of me so?'

"He could n't deny it in the face of the
men standin' thah who had heard him, so he
said: -

" 'I was drunk when I did that.'Fore
Almighty God, Miss Mary,' he said solemnly,
'thah's no ground foh it. Thah's no woman
in the State more deservin' of honor than
you.'

" 'That is enough foh me,' she said. 'Now,
foh you' - She put her hand in her pocket
and took out a little pistol and shot him
through the head. Then she rode back home
again."

"She killed him! Did n't they arrest her?"
we cried.

"Arrest her? Why, you don't understand.
Thah was nobody to do it but her. Of course
she was sorry about it," said my friend, stroking
the fringe of her overskirt, "but it had
to be done. She married soon after that.
Oh, I forgot to tell you," she pattered on,
smiling. "Little Willy cried when he understood
whah Mary had been.

" 'That was my business, sister,' he said.

"Bless the child! of cohse, if he had been
a little bigger - But they would probably
have disarmed the boy, and not have given
him fair play."

And as she talked, my mind swung dizzily
back to the old point of view. What, after
all, was the Colonel's life, or any life, if honor
was at stake?

"Poh Mary!" Aunt Dody was saying.
"She's dead now. Died six years ago, just
tired out. Her husband was a rampagious
kind of creature, and so were her daughters.
Mary was always a timid little body, and she
spent her life tryin' to make the world easy
for them."

"Did she ever regret what she had done?"

"Oh, no! Why, certainly not! I never
heard her speak of Colonel Dupree but once.
She said, 'I am sorry, Aunt Dody, it was I
who had to do that. He made much mischief
in the world. But perhaps he's doin' better
now - elsewhere.' Perhaps he is," sighed
Aunt Theodora, doubtfully shaking her head.

"Of course you remember," said the Judge,
now joining in the discussion, "that there
was a strained feeling between the Impeys
and the Delascos?"

too big a name. The low-class whites in your
Virginia hills here have vendettas, and are
always in the papers. That was just a -
difficulty between those families. They said
little about it, but it has been going on since
the opening of the country. Thah don't seem
to have been any reason foh it - no insult -
nothing tangible. But the two families are
different, and apparently they can't tolerate
each other on the same earth. Foh fifty years
not a Delasco died in his bed. Yes, they
certainly ran it pretty hard then."

As he spoke, the forgotten story came back
to me. Neither family had allowed the feud
to absorb their lives. They were planters,
lawyers, or speculators, many of them busy
and useful men. But when one of their natural
enemies came on their path they rid it of
him as they would of any other noxious
vermin. Their neighbors had always looked on
with mild regret. It was a pity, they thought,
that two such important and agreeable families
felt it to be their duty to kill each other
on sight. But nothing in their code could
have been more underbred than interference.

"There are families," the Judge said
ponderously, "that die of consumption, and some
are mowed down by scrofula. But it does n't
seem to be God's law that an Impey or a
Delasco should die of disease. They were
meant to make an end of each other. And
of cohse you can't run against God's law."

"What became of Major Delasco?" we
asked. "When we left Big Spring he had
eighteen duels on hand."

The Judge laughed. "Oh, he came through
them without a scratch, and others - others.
Gentlemen shot wide with the Major. He
was a friendly old soul, pottering about, always
bragging of his fancy poultry or his
brew of apple toddy. One of the Texan Impeys
made an end of him. Picked a quarrel
on the road, and used his knife on the old
man. I never asked the details. I could n't
hear them. The Major's death was a great
shock to me - a great shock."

"And then, the Texas Impey?"

"Well, of course the Major's sons set out
at once after him. But Dan, their old coachman,
met him on the street in Huntsville, and

I never knew the man whom I call Willy
Impey, except through our mutual friends.
He was for years a favorite leader of the
German at Saratoga and the White Sulphur
Springs, and was always a prominent figure
at the Mardi Gras - a little, gay, fair man, as
nervous and affectionate as a woman. He
went reluctantly into the war, "not wanting
to kill anybody, not even the Yankees," but
once in he fought with a blind fury.

The end of the struggle left him ruined.
He tried once or twice weakly to earn his
living, but soon collapsed into the old routine
of dancing and card-playing. He could n't,
as the Judge expressed it, "raise cotton" - a
more venial fault of character always in the
South than in the North. His mother had a

small income, and he lived with her. But she
never was satisfied with him. She was a
woman of fine presence, and much fluency. She
talked a good deal of "men who etched their
names high on the roll of southern chivalry."

But Willy did not trouble himself with
etching his name anywhere.

Mrs. Mabury, on one of her visits, years
later, told us of his death.

"Willy," she said, "was just going seriously
to work, when he was cut off. He was quite
in earnest that time. Of cohse he had his
jokes and songs as always - it would n't have
been Willy if he had n't. As for drink - he
did n't take to it regularly - no. But
occasionally, of cohse -

"He owned a large track at Big Spring,
and he decided to come back and grow cotton
thah. He was n't goin' to do it in the old
way, either. He looked into the new methods,
and hired an expert as overseer, and spent
what little he had in machinery and the like.
Well, the overseer arrived and began work.
Willy was to come next week. But, you see,
in all these years the Delascos had seated

themselves firmly at the Spring. They used
the old methods, and the word got about that
this Impey fellow meant to run them out with
his modern improvements. The Judge heard
the storm risin', and he wrote to Willy
begging him not to come.

" 'Foh God's sake,' he said, 'don't open up
the old grudge! Thah'll be trouble!' But
Willy appeared on the day set, smilin' an'
funnin' away as usual.

" 'Pretty talk,' he says, 'that a man cahn't
fahm his own ground as he likes in this year
of the nineteenth century, in a Christian
community. Why, bless yoh soul, Aunt Dody, I've
no grudge against the Delascos!' he says.

"But the Delascos met in their houses an'
wohked each other up to a fury. It was n't
Willy's fahm they were against, it was Willy.
They are reasonable men - some of them.
But it was the old hate comin' up again in
their blood. They could n't help it, I suppose.
Well" - she glanced around, suddenly pale,
"it was done, an' I was thah."

the mohnin'. The Judge had gone to the city,
so I went myself to the tahvern whah Willy
was - Ody Peay's, you know, only it's another
house, an' Ody's dead. Willy was upstahs eatin'
his breakfast. He laughed at me. I told
him they said he should not leave the town
alive. 'Dear Aunt Dody,' he said, 'they've
been scaring you because you're a woman.'

"Then the landlord came in, out of breath.
'Mr. Impey,' he said, 'the Delascos are below
in the hall six of them. They sent word
foh you to come down. Every man of 'em has
his gun!' Willy stood up. He had no blood
in his face. You know Willy never was a
fighter.

" 'I am not armed, Mr. Pomeroy,' he said.
'Do the gentlemen know that I am not
armed?'

" 'Yes. They don't keer. They bid me tell
you thah was but one Impey livin', and the
earth was tired of carrying him.'

"Pomeroy ran into a back room. 'Hyah,
sir,' he says; 'thah's a ladder down into the
kitchen. I can hide you in the cellar. Come.
Thah's a chance!'

IV.
THE SCOTCH-IRISHMAN

SITTING by the chimney
corner as we grow
old, the commonest things around us take on
live meanings and hint at the difference
between these driving times and the calm, slow
moving days when we were young.

Now here beside me, for instance, is an
old high clock - the kind whose one weight
hangs on groaning chains - such as the first
Swedish settlers brought with them on their
barkentine, the Key of Calmar, the first vessel
to sail up Delaware Bay yonder, then a silent
and nameless flood of water.

It reminds me of just such a clock which
stood in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania fifty
years ago, and of a little circumstance
concerning it which has a curious significance.

I was a visitor one fall in this house, a large
stone homestead set on a low hill, with its
barns and corn ricks and cider presses, hedged

in by orchards and rolling wheat fields, while
beyond stretched miles of forests of oak and
sycamore. Nowhere in this country, from sea
to sea, does nature comfort us with such
assurance of plenty, such rich and tranquil
beauty as in those unsung, unpainted hills of
Pennsylvania.

The farmer's family belonged to what in
England would be called the upper middle
class, and in France the haute bourgeoisie.
They were of Scotch-Irish blood. Their kinsfolk
were the small lawyers, doctors, ministers,
and farmers of country places; these men
drove the plow, the women milked, cooked,
and sewed. But there was a Knabe Grand in
the parlor and fine damask in the linen closet
and on a couple of shelves some books, -
Scott, and the "Spectator," and Bunyan's
Complete Works, cook books and Cæsar,
and Black on the Horse. I don't believe you
could find just that kind of people now in
the whole country.

One cool September afternoon the clock
mender came to the farm on his rounds. He
drove a stout gray mare, in a little wagon with

one seat and a box at the back, in which were
his tools and a basket of provisions, for he
made long journeys across the Alleghany
Mountains, and there were few country inns
in those days. Each farmer's wife when he
was going away gave him a plentiful "piece"
for two or three meals. He managed to visit
each farmhouse once in a year, gathering the
cream of the gossip from the Juniata to the
Ohio.

We saw him coming up the long avenue of
oaks and sycamores, waving his whip cheerfully.
He had, too, a little horn, which he
tooted to give notice of his arrival. The farmer
was in the meadows a mile away, but his wife
welcomed him, and bade him carry his carpet
sack upstairs, for it was a matter of course
that he would stay all night.

Then he went into the living-room and
hurried, box in hand, to the high clock in the
corner. His hostess ran after him with an
anxious face.

"Yes, yes, I understand," he said, and
stepping on a chair put his hand behind a gilt
dragon on the top of the clock and brought

"I know," he said, with a significant nod
as she hurried away. "I doctor all the clocks
in Pennsylvania west of the Alleghanies, and
there is not one in a hundred which has not
an old teapot on the top. It is the farmer's
bank."

Later in the day my hostess beckoned me
into her room, and lifting the lid of the old
pot held it before me. It was full to the brim
of coins, gold eagles, silver dollars, Spanish
"levies" and "fips," even copper cents.

"This is our bank," she said, with a proud
smile. "We started it the day after we were
married. Penny by penny. All John could
scrape up. My money for butter and for the
calves. Jem never could have got through
college but for this old pot, and all Molly's
plenishing when she was married came out
of it."

The broken teapot was significant of the
business habits of the American of that day
of the Middle States. He worked steadily,
he had scarcely heard of speculation; if he

became a "warm" man it was by dint of saving.
The old teapot held countless comforts
denied, countless innocent pleasures given up.
His object in work or in saving was to
educate his children - to push them on. He must
add acre to acre to the farm for Joe; he must
help Bill into the law - "Bill had a gift of the
gab;" he must give Harry his schooling for
the ministry. There was a feeling in his class,
almost universal then, that one son in a family
should be given to the work of the Lord.

I must interrupt myself to say just here
that the character and manners of the
Scotch-Irish settler in the Middle States
were always very different from those of the
Southerner and New Englander. It is worth
while to mention the fact, because there is a
vague popular belief that in the early times
there were neither manners nor character in
the country outside of New England and
eastern Virginia.

The cause of this popular error is easy to
understand. The Puritan and Cavalier both
were keen-sighted, self-conscious men. During

the early years of the Colonies they made
anxious interminable notes of their own
feelings and doings. These notes afterwards
furnished welcome material to American
historians for comment, and the accumulation
of both notes and comments is now so great,
that we have come to think that American
history in our first century concerned only
the people of those two small sections.

We are often told that the American derives
his intelligence from his New England
ancestor and his courage from the Virginian.
But has not the Scotch-Irishman contributed
to the national character his shrewd common
sense, his loyalty to his wife, his family, and
his country? Narrow, homely qualities, perhaps.
But they have their uses, after all.

Even to this day the Scotch-Irishman
does not trouble himself to talk about his
work, or to set forth his merits or those of
his forefathers. He is an able, reticent,
pig-headed, devout fellow, and cares little what
the world thinks of him. His natural traits
have been strengthened by circumstances.

landed on a stony, barren tract, and a large
share of his strength during two centuries
has gone to force a living out of it. Hence
he has come to regard economy - a necessary
unpleasant quality at best - as the chief
of virtues. He has cultivated habits which
verge on closeness in dealing with food,
and with the expression of feeling, and
even - his enemies think - with feeling
itself.

Why did he not in the beginning push on
away from the barren coast to the lands
below - rich as the garden of the Lord? It
was no doubt a very poetic, picturesque thing
to land on Plymouth Rock; but surely it was
a stupid thing to stay there.

The Scotch-Irish new-comer took
possession of the fat hillsides and plains of
Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He has had to
spend but little of his force in earning a
living. He brought with him as a rule some
little capital, and with it took up large tracts
and built cabins and forts.

His son settled himself more firmly on the
land. He built - not the thin wooden

cottages of the Northern States - but solid
houses of brick or gray uncut stone.

Many of these old homesteads are still
standing on the hills which slope from the
heights of the Alleghanies down to the rich
river-bottoms below. They are surrounded
by huge barns, offices, and cider presses
inclosed in great gardens and orchards.
Beyond these stretch fields of waving corn and
pasture lands. More than all the dwellings
in the world, - from English castle to Swiss
hut, - these old homesteads seem to me to
express the protection and peace of home.

Their builders managed to bring into them
many comforts and even luxuries from the
old country. The woodwork in the one that
I knew best was mahogany, imported from
England when it had to be carried in a sailing
vessel to the colonies and across the
Alleghany Mountains in wagons. I must confess
that the cleanly zeal of its owners put a coat
of white paint at once on the rich wine-colored
doors and mantels, and repeated it
every spring.

delicate china, which was brought to her in
the same way. The great establishment was
self-supporting - pork, beef, and venison
were salted down for winter use; pickles,
vegetables, and preserves stored; there was
a great dairy; a loom room where all the
linen was woven; the kitchens swarmed with
servants, bound apprentices, Redemptorists,
and black bondsmen, for Pennsylvania as
yet had not rid herself of slavery.

The mother of the family was expected
not only to know how to weave, to cook, to
spin, but to control this great household in
a Christian spirit. Her daughters were sent
to Philadelphia for "a year's finishing."
They went and came across the mountains
on horseback. They learned in this year to
play a couple of tunes on the guitar, to
embroider, to make lace and wax flowers, and
they each brought home huge pictures done
by them in filagree of "Washington's Tomb
guarded by Faith, Hope, and Charity."

They belonged to the generation before
mine. Their city training did not unfit them
for the work of pickling, weaving, and cooking,

or the control of their own households,
when the time came for them to marry.

The habits of these folk, as I remember
them when I was a child, were generous and
hospitable. There was much rivalry between
women in household matters. Certain
receipts in pastry and pickles and medicine
were handed down in families from generation
to generation. There were few formal
dinners, but cover for the accidental guest
was always laid on the supper table. Everyday
life then was merry and cordial, but it
needed a wedding or a death to bring out
the deeper current of friendly, tender feeling
in these people. Death was then really an
agreeable incident to look forward to, when
one was sure to be lauded and mourned
with such fervent zeal.

The belief in education as the chief good
was as fervent and purblind as now. Every
county had its small sectarian college: the
boy, if he were poor, worked or taught in
summer to push his way through.

But while the ordinary life of these people
was thus wholesome and kindly, their religion,

oddly enough, was a very different matter.
The father of that day believed that his first
duty toward his child was to save him from
hell. The baby, no matter how sweet or fair,
was held to be a vessel of wrath and a servant
of the devil, unless he could be rescued.

To effect this rescue the father and mother
prayed and labored unceasingly. The hill of
Zion, up which they led the boy, was no path
of roses. Above was an angry God; below
was hell. They taught him to be honest, to
be chaste and truthful in word and act, under
penalty of the rod. The rawhide hung over
the fireplace ready for instant use in most
respectable families. The father who spared
it on his son felt that he was giving him over
to damnation. Often the blows cut into his
own heart deeper than into the child's back,
but he gave them with fiercer energy,
believing that it was Satan who moved him to
compassion.

As most pleasant things in life were then
supposed to be temptations of the devil, they
were forbidden to the young aspirant to
Heaven. The theatre and the ballroom were

denounced; cards, pretty dresses, and, in
some sects, music and art, were purveyors of
souls for the devil. To become a Christian
meant to give up forever these carnal things.

Parents who were not members of any
church also taught their children self-denial.
Did a boy cut his finger, the first howl was
silenced with: "Not a word! Close your
mouth tight! A man never cries!" The
same adjurations were given when the whip
was being applied to his back.

A high-tempered child was held by many
intelligent parents to be possessed with a
kind of demon, which required strong
measures for its expulsion.

"You must break his spirit and then he
will obey you," was the universal rule. In
my childhood I once heard a bishop, who I
am sure was a kindly, godly man, say: -

"Whipping does not always conquer a
child's spirit, but I never have known a dash
of ice water on his spine to fail."

It was believed that, once conquered, the
child would yield implicit obedience to his
parents and in that unreasoning, unquestioning

obedience lay his one chance of safety.
Had not God appointed them his guardians
during the years when his brain and soul
were immature?

Then there came to parents successive
pauses of doubt, of inquiry. There were
heard at first timorous suggestions of "moral
suasion." Was the soul really reached by a
rawhide on the back? Why not appeal to
the higher nature of the child? Why not
give up thrashing and lure him to virtue by
his reason? The child who was old enough
to sin was old enough to be redeemed. Why
not then bring about the awful change of
soul called conversion, in infancy?

This theory, urged in practice by pious,
zealous people, caused, half a century ago, a
sudden outbreak of infant piety. I do not
speak irreverently. There is nothing on
earth so near akin to God as one of his
little ones. Our Lord, when he would set
before his apostles an example for their lives,
placed a child, pure, humble, and innocent,
in their midst. But he did not send that
child out to preach the Gospel.

The children of fifty years ago, if they
were nervous and imitative, soon caught the
religious dialect of the hour. They lisped of
regeneration and sanctification; every village
boasted of its baby saint, usually an anæmic
inheritor of consumption, whose diseased
brain fed on his body. Tales of his super-human
virtue and piety were carried by eager
grandparents and aunts far and wide, and
often crept into print. I remember especially
one popular book, - a memoir of Louisa B.,
who was hopefully converted at three, and
died, triumphant, praying for her unregenerate
neighbors, at four years of age!

The Sunday-school libraries were flooded
with fictitious tales of boy and girl
evangelists, who invariably were weighted in life
by drunken fathers, fashionable mothers, or
infidel uncles. The conversion of these sinners
by pious infants was the motive of most
of the Sunday-school books of that day.

Boy preachers were another product of this
phase of education. Lads of twelve or
fourteen, driven by excitement into hysterical
raptures, were carried from pulpit to pulpit

to kindle revivals. Such boys usually
continued in the public eye, voluble and zealous,
for a few years, and then lapsed into obscurity,
carrying with them an overweening vanity,
a bitter sense of failure, and abnormally
dull brains which yielded them nothing but
headaches.

It seems incredible to the shrewd, practical,
unimaginative American of to-day that his
forefathers could ever have led their children
to such spiritual intoxication.

But, after all, it was the methods, not the
motives, of the man of that day that were at
fault.

The Almighty, you must remember, was
always present with him. He appealed to
God when he lay down to sleep and when he
arose, when he ate or when he fasted, when
he wanted rain and when he had too much
rain. If he should die suddenly it would be
by the visitation of God; if he sent out a
cargo he invoked God, on the bill of lading,
to bring the good ship into a safe harbor.
He held that this Supreme Power took a
personal interest in his crops, his rheumatism,

and his choice of a wife. He tried, naturally,
to make his children the servants of this
Omnipotent Ruler. Whether he set his boy in a
pulpit or took him to the barn and whipped
him like a dog, his motive was the same -
to make him a Christian, and a faithful
follower of God.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an
alien monstrous terror. He was not forced,
as we are, by daily friction with crowds, by
telegraphs, railways, and morning papers, to
take it into his decent jog-trot life and grow
familiar with it. He was not familiar with it.
A murder became a traditional horror in a
neighborhood for generations. The whole
nation sat up shuddering night after night
to hear the end of the Parkman-Webster trial.
People then looked at an atheist or a
divorcee as we would at the Gila monster.

Religious dogma was the chief food for
the brain of that long-ago Quaker, or Presbyterian,
or Baptist. He wrangled over predestination
or immersion at the table, in the shop,
as he got up, and as he went to bed. He was
ready to give his life, as some of his fathers

had done, for his special dogma Unfortunately,
he mistook dogmas for religion. He
knew the Bible by heart, and quoted it
incessantly. He did this even though he were not
a church member. Every American then,
though he might himself be a criminal, venerated
religion. The minister was still a power
in the land; he was the universal friend and
advisor - the "sense-carrier" in the early
settlements. "The cloth" was honored as
the sign of a real authority, and the Bible was
the most sacred visible thing on earth. Even
the sinner acknowledged that it was the Word
of God - that in it was written his own sentence,
the law that gave him his place forever
yonder in that unseen eternity. Every child
in a respectable family learned verses from it
by heart daily. The family where this was not
done was considered below caste. Thus the
child for half an hour each day was made
familiar with the great truths of life in the
noblest English ever written; a training surely
as useful in the making of a man as the finger
drills of the modern kindergarten which
have replaced it.

Education was different then, too. The
daughter in a family of gentlefolk was usually
trained in a quiet private school or at home.
She learned enough arithmetic to keep her
accounts, enough astronomy to point out the
constellations, a little music and drawing, and
French, history, and literature at discretion.
In fact, the peculiar characteristic of that old
training was that it all was at discretion.
Ordinary girls learned enough to enable them
to pass intelligently through the ordinary
happenings of their lives. But if a girl had
the capacity or desire for further development
in any special direction, she easily
obtained it.

Before the birth of the New Woman the
country was not an intellectual desert, as she
is apt to suppose. There were teachers of
the highest grade, and libraries, and countless
circles in our towns and villages of
scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and
music, and Nature, and lived much apart
with them. The mad craze for money, which
clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does
at our bodies, was hardly known then. The

Then, too, he had not begun to coöperate
- to fuse himself into Guilds, and Unions,
and Leagues. The individual developed
slowly and fully. He followed his own chosen
path. Now, the essential duty set before him
is to keep step with some body of men, to be
one of a majority - to sink himself in the
mass.

There was space in that calm, leisurely life
for the full growth of personality. Hence, if
a boy or girl had a call to any kind of mental
work, they followed it quietly and steadily.
They studied Greek, or mathematics, or
literature, because Nature had fitted them for
that especial study.

But I am forgetting my old friends with
their little black teapot.

Twenty years later I went back to the old
farm. The orchards, the yellow wheat fields,
the great silent woods, were all swept away.
In their stead a vast plain, treeless and
grassless, stretched to the horizon. Here and
there upon it huge derricks and pyramids of

hogsheads of petroleum rose against the sky.
The farmhouse was gone; in its stead were
the shops and saloons of a busy drunken
town.

My old friends had struck oil; their well
was one of the largest in the State. Money
poured in on them in streams, in floods. It
ceased to mean to them education or comfort
or the service of God. It was power,
glory. They grew drunk with the thought of
it. The old people hoarded it with sudden
terror lest it should vanish. Their only son
came to the East with his share, and his
idiotic excesses made him the laughing stock
of all New York. He was known as Coal-Oil
Jimmy, and drove every day on Broadway
in a four-in-hand with white horses and
a band of music. He died, I believe, in an
almshouse.

This was thirty years ago. You will search
now in vain in that neighborhood for the old
type of farm and farmer. There are no longer
little dairies where the women beat their
fragrant butter into shapes, stamp them with
their initials, and send them proudly into

market. The butter is made by men en masse,
in huge creameries, and handled by wooden
paddles. The farmers' daughters, if they are
well-to-do, are traveling abroad; if they are
not, the girls are stenographers or saleswomen
in some city.

Nowhere will you find the old black teapot
hidden, with its little pathetic hoardings.
Nowhere, either, will you find the mad craze
of sudden wealth. Coal-Oil Jimmy belonged
to a generation that is dead.

We have grown used to money. The
handling, the increase of it, is the chief
business of life now with most of us. The
farmer's wife no longer gives her mind to the
small ambitions of sewing rag carpets or
making jelly. Even she has her little investments.
She keeps an eye on certain western
gold mines, in which she has secretly "taken
a flyer" now and then; she even buys on a
margin through a broker, unsuspected by
her husband or the boys.

The grandson of these Bible worshipers,
still nominally a Christian, an educated young
fellow familiar with the literature of half a

dozen countries, probably never has read a
chapter in the Bible and never will. Whether
it is the Word of God or of some Jewish
poets he really has never cared to inquire.
The oddest point, indeed, of his position as
to this question is his absolute indifference
to it. He has a vague idea that the Book
was lately overthrown by the Higher
Criticism.

But as to what the criticism is, or what the
Book, he has but vague ideas. They bore
him, and in his hasty march through life he
has learned the trick of promptly ridding his
path of all things that bore him.

The literature of his work, whatever that
may be, does not bore him - reports of
stocks, or of new microbes, or of findings in
court. These things he understands. But
talk to him of foreordination or sanctification,
or any of the doctrines for which his
fathers fought and sometimes died, and he
will listen to you civilly, but privately he will
think you a crank or mad.

What have these abstractions, he says, to
do with life? His work is his life. Work

now puts a stress and strain on men of which
our ancestors knew little. The American is in
the thick of it. Whether he be President
or newspaper reporter, he feels that he
personally has the world by the throat, and that
if he loose his hold for a minute the progress
of the universe will come to a stop.

What time has he for abstractions, for
looking into the Trinity or the Atonement,
or hell itself? These are mysteries, he says
frankly, which neither he nor any other man
ever did or ever could understand.

Is this irreverent, busy fellow, then, less a
servant of God than his lean, church-going,
irascible ancestor?

Prosperity has softened him. He has become
good-humored, cheerful, and kindly,
much more ready to help his neighbor than
was his grandfather. That faithful old soldier
fought the devil, prayed and fasted, and
argued, in order that he himself might escape
from hell. That was his chief business in
life - to save his own soul. He had little
time to give to his neighbor.

hands too full of work to attend to straightening
out his relations with his Maker. He
does work well. He has nourished the root
of brotherly love, which Christ planted, into
a marvelous flowering and fruitage. Asylums,
free schools, missions to the heathen,
sick kitchens in the slums, are his triumph
and delight. Take any of our large cities.
You may find the churches almost empty,
but the hospitals will be full and well
supported.

Leading business men hardly know the
meaning of the dogmas for which their
fathers fought to the death, but tell them of
starving Russians or plague-stricken Hindus
and their zeal flames out in white heat. Ships
or trains cannot fly quickly enough around
the world to carry their help and good-will.

It is true that our people now do not
acknowledge Christ with the unquestioning
veneration which their fathers felt. With a
conceit quite unconscious of its own absurdity,
each college boy and girl puts the Almighty
and His Messenger to man on trial,
and pronounces judgment on them.

But, after all, we are a young nation, and
vanity is a fault of youth. We will grow out
of it presently.

In the mean time the spirit of Christianity
becomes more dominant among us with every
year. Never since Jesus was born in Bethlehem
have his teachings of brotherly love so moved
any people as they do these doubting
Americans, here and to-day.

V.
THE CIVIL WAR

I LIVED, during three
years of the war, on
the border of West Virginia. Sectional
pride or feeling never was so distinct or
strong there as in the New England or lower
Southern States. We occupied the place of
Hawthorne's unfortunate man who saw both
sides. In every village opinions clashed.
The elders of the family, as a rule, sided
with the Government; the young folks with
the South.

Throughout the whole country, however,
there was a time when the great mass of the
people took no part in the quarrel. They
were stunned, appalled. I never have seen
an adequate description anywhere of the
amazement, the uncomprehending horror of
the bulk of the American people which preceded
the firing of that gun at Sumter. Politicians
or far-sighted leaders on both sides

knew what was coming. And it is they who
have written histories of the war. But to the
easy-going millions, busied with their farms
or shops, the onrushing disaster was as
inexplicable as an earthquake. Their protest
arose from sea to sea like the clamor of a
gigantic hive of frightened bees.

Each man, however, after the American
habit, soon grappled with the difficulty and
discovered a cure for it. He urged his remedy
incessantly - in church councils, in town
meetings, at the street corners. The local
newspapers were filled with these schemes
for bringing calm and content again into the
country.

One venerable neighbor of ours, I remember,
insisted that, to warm the chilled loyalty
of the nation, the Declaration should be read
in every house, night and morning, at family
prayers. Another, with the same intent,
proposed that every boy in the public schools
should at once commit the Constitution to
memory. It was urged that women should
sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" in season
and out of season.

In several towns bands of young girls
marched through the streets singing it in a
kind of holy zeal, believing, poor children,
as they were told, that they would soon
"bring again peace unto Israel."

These efforts to keep off the approaching
disaster were urged in both southern and
northern towns. The superstitious fervor of
the people was aroused. Devout old men
who, with tears and wrestlings of soul for
their country, prayed themselves to sleep
at night, naturally had revelations before
morning of some remedy for her mortal
illness. Women, everywhere, neglected their
sewing, housekeeping, and even their love
affairs, to consult and bemoan together.
They were usually less devout and more radical
in their methods of cure than the men;
demanding that somebody should at once be
hanged or locked up for life. Whether the
victim should be Buchanan, Lincoln, or Jefferson
Davis depended upon the quarter of the
Union in which the women happened to
live.

Naturally, these hosts of terrified, sincere
folk carried their remedies to the place where
they would be of use. Their letters and
petitions flooded Congress and the White House
for a year.

As the skies darkened, the country was
astir with alarmed folk hurrying to their own
sections like frightened homing birds. The
South had been filled with traders and teachers
from the North; northern colleges and
summering places depended largely on
southern custom. There had always been
much intermarriage in the well-to-do classes
of the two sections.

These ties were torn apart now with fierce
haste in the alarm which followed Lincoln's
election. By the time that he started to
Washington to be inaugurated, the tension of
feeling throughout the country had reached
its limit.

The great mass of the people as yet took
little interest in any of the questions involved
except the vital one - whether the

Union should be preserved. The Union, to
the average American of that day, was as
essential a foundation of life as was his Bible
or his God.

When Mr. Lincoln began his journey
every eye was fixed on him in an agony of
anxiety. How would he meet the crisis?
Could he cope with it? It is only one of
the facts of history that his cheerful, jocular
bearing on the journey convinced the mass
of people that he did not even know that
there was a crisis. The stories he told to the
waiting crowds at every station were funny,
but nobody laughed at them.

The nation grew sick at heart.

The truth probably is, that while the soul
of the man faced the great work before him,
he hid his real thoughts from prying eyes
behind his ordinary habits of speech.

A little incident that I know to be true
always seemed to me to throw a light on
Lincoln's character.

There was a young girl in Springfield of
whom he and his family were very fond. Mr.
Lincoln was in the habit of saying, "Mary

must marry P-," naming a friend of his
own living in another State. He contrived
to bring P- to Springfield and brought
them together, with the result that they fell
in love with each other. P-, however,
was hopelessly shy, and Mr. Lincoln's proddings
and urgings only alarmed and daunted
him.

Two or three days before their departure
for Washington Mrs. Lincoln asked the
scared young people to supper, and their
host, feeling that time was short, seemed to
forget the nation and its woes in vainly
trying to bring them together. The evening
was over. Mary rose to go. She lived on the
other side of the street.

"P- will see you home," said Mr. Lincoln,
going to the door with them in the
hearty western fashion. A heavy storm was
raging; they reached the pavement to find a
flood of water pouring down the gutter, and
stopped dismayed.

The next morning when Mary came,
blushing and happy, to tell him that she was
engaged before she reached the other side of
the street, he nodded, laughing.

"I knew that would do the work," he said.

It was not, perhaps, a method used by the
Vere de Veres, but it was very human - and
it did the work.

That probably is the key to many other
strange actions in Lincoln's life. When work
was to be done, he tried the first method
that came to hand without any critical nice
delays.

The volunteers in both armies were, as a
rule, a God-fearing, church-going body of
men. I doubt whether an American army
to-day would pay as much outward deference
to religion. Stonewall Jackson was not the
only commander who prayed at the head of
his troops before going into action. North
and South were equally confident that God
was on their side, and appealed incessantly
to him.

The town in which I lived at the beginning
of the war was taken at once under the

control of the Government and made the
headquarters of the Mountain Department,
first under Rosecrans and then under Frémont.
Rosecrans impressed the townspeople
as a plain man of business, but Frémont was
the ideal soldier, - simple, high-bred,
courteous; always at a white heat of purpose.
His wife was constantly beside him, urging
the cause with all the wonderful magnetism
which then made her the most famous of
American women.

The histories which we have of the great
tragedy give no idea of the general
wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered
into every individual life in the region given
up to the war. Where the armies camped
the destruction was absolute.

Even on the border, your farm was a waste,
all your horses or cows were seized by one
army or the other, or your shop or manufactory
was closed, your trade ruined. You had
no money; you drank coffee made of roasted
parsnips for breakfast, and ate only potatoes
for dinner. Your nearest kinsfolk and friends
passed you on the street silent and scowling;

if you said what you thought you were liable
to be dragged to the county jail and left there
for months. The subject of the war was never
broached in your home, where opinions differed;
but, one morning, the boys were missing.
No one said a word, but one gray head
was bent, and the happy light died out of
the old eyes and never came to them again.
Below all the squalor and discomfort was the
agony of suspense or the certainty of death.
But the parsnip coffee and the empty purse
certainly did give a sting to the great
overwhelming misery, like gnats tormenting a
wounded man.

Absurd things happened sometimes, however,
and gave us the relief of a laugh. Two
of my girl friends, for instance, had a queer
experience. They lived on a plantation near
Winchester. The men of the family were
in the southern army when that town was
first taken by the Federal troops. Word was
sent to their mother that two Union officers
would that evening be quartered on her.
The girls, in a panic, with the help of an
old house servant, put all their table silver

and jewels into boxes which they buried in
the barnyard. The supper table was laid with
coarse yellow linen, delft, and two-pronged
iron forks, brought from the kitchen.

"The Yankee thieves," they boasted,
"should find nothing to steal."

What was their dismay, when supper was
served and the guests appeared, to meet two
men with whom they had danced and flirted
the summer away at Saratoga!

"What could we do?" tearfully they said
afterward; "the silver was buried deep in the
barnyard. We could not tell them we had
hid it, expecting them to pocket the spoons.
For two weeks they were with us, and went
away, no doubt, to say that all the old families
of the South ate on kitchen-ware with iron
forks."

There was, too, many a laugh in the
preparation of troops for action. Regiments of
men who never had fired a gun were
commanded by men who never had handled a
sword. Farmers, clerks, dentists, and shopkeepers
to-day - presto! to-morrow, soldiers!
Many a new-made officer sat up half the night

to learn the orders he must give in the morning.
One gallant old officer told me, "When
I went out to drill my men I always had
the orders written on my shirt-cuff." Being
near-sighted, he actually, at Culpepper, led
the wrong regiment in a charge, leaving his
own men standing idle.

The newly-made surgeon of a newly-made
regiment came to bid us good-by before going
to the field. "Yes," he said exultantly,"we're
off to the front to-morrow. My men are ready.
I've vaccinated all of them, and given every
man a box of liver pills."

Yet with all this fever of preparation we
never quite believed that there was war until,
one day, a rough wooden box was sent down
from the mountains. A young officer had
been killed by a sharpshooter, and his body
was forwarded that it might be cared for and
sent to his friends. He was a very handsome
boy, and the men in the town went to look
at him and at the little purple spot on his
white breast, and came away dull and sick
at heart. They did not ask whether he had
been loyal or a rebel.

"He was so young! He might have done so
much!" they said. "But this is war - war!"

I remember that in that same year I crossed
the Pennsylvania mountains coming to Philadelphia.
It was a dull, sunless day. The train
halted at a little way station among the hills.
Nobody was in sight but a poor, thin country
girl, in a faded calico gown and sun-bonnet.
She stood alone on the platform, waiting. A
child was playing beside her.

When we stopped the men took out from
the freight car a rough, unplaned pine box
and laid it down, baring their heads for a
minute. Then the train steamed away. She
sat down on the ground and put her arms
around the box and leaned her head on it.
The child went on playing. So we left her.
I never have seen so dramatic or significant
a figure.

When we hear of thousands of men killed
in battle it means nothing to us. We forget
it in an hour. It is these little things that
come home to us. When we remember them
we say: -

One of the most dramatic pictures of the war
which remains in my memory is the departure
of a company of Maryland boys to join General
Lee. They left secretly and at night, as
the Federal troops were in possession of all
the passes in the neighborhood. But they met
in the evening at the home of their captain,
to receive, before they went, their colors from
his mother's hand. He was nothing but a
boy - they all were boys, in fact. And "he
was the only son of his mother, and she was
a widow."

It was a moonlight night, and the young
men gathered on the lawn under the trees.
When she came out on the high steps of the
veranda she carried a tattered old flag. Her
son came up and stood before her.

"Your grandfather fought under it at Valley
Forge," she said; "he, too, went to meet
the invader, and" - She had a little speech
all ready to make, but she broke down here,
thrust the old flag into his hand, crying, "Oh,
Tom, you'll never come back to me." And he
knelt, kissing her hands and crying over them,
and the boys drew out their brand-new swords

A month later I stood on the porch of a
country house on Staten Island with Robert
Shaw's mother, another most true and
womanly woman, who had sent out her boy at
the head of a negro troop. She showed me
his watch, shattered by a bullet, that he had
sent to her, after a battle.

"It saved his life," she said; "I think he
will come back to me. But if he never comes
back" - and her face glowed and her eyes
shone.

A few weeks later he lay dead, buried beneath
his black soldiers.

These are two true pictures. I know they
are the only kind which this generation wishes
to see of the Civil War. Novels and magazines
are filled nowadays with stories of gallant
boys and noble old men from every free
and every slave State dying for the cause they
loved. We all like to think that that great
national convulsion was caused by an outbreak
of pure patriotism, of chivalry, of self-sacrifice
in both South and North.

Measurably that is true. But there were
phases of the long struggle familiar enough
to us then which never have been painted for
posterity. There were, for instance, regiments
on both sides which had been wholly recruited
from the jails and penitentiaries.

This class of the soldiery raged like wild,
beasts through the mountains of the border
States. They burned, they murdered men,
women, and children, they cut out the tongues
of old men who would not answer their
questions.

Again, it must be remembered that a large
number of men in both armies did not, as we
imagine now, volunteer in a glow of patriotic
zeal for an idea - to save either the Union
or the Confederacy - to free the negro or to
defend state's rights. They were not all
fervid, chivalric Robert Shaws or Robert Lees.
They went into the army simply to earn a
living. This was especially true in the border
States during the later years of the war. Every
industry, except those necessary for the
maintenance of the army, had then come to a full
stop. The war was the sole business of the

nation. With many laboring men the only
choice was to enlist or starve.

A large proportion of recruits, too, during
these later years were drafted, and served
only because they could not afford to pay
for a substitute. So unwilling then were the
men outside of the army to go into it that if
a citizen were drafted he was obliged to pay
from $400 to $2000 bounty for a man to be
shot at in his place. Substitutes were cheaper
in 1864, because then every incoming steamer
brought swarms of Germans, Huns, and Irish
to profit by this new industry.

We don't often look into these unpleasant
details of our great struggle. We all prefer
to think that every man who wore the blue
or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

These are sordid facts that I have dragged
up. But - they are facts. And because we
have hidden them our young people have
come to look upon war as a kind of
beneficent deity, which not only adds to the
national honor but uplifts a nation and develops
patriotism and courage.

let them know that the garments of the deity
are filthy and that some of her influences
debase and befoul a people.

There was one curious fact which I do
not remember ever to have seen noticed in
histories of the war, and that was its effect
upon the nation as individuals. Men and
women thought and did noble and mean
things that would have been impossible to
them before or after. A man cannot drink
old Bourbon long and remain in his normal
condition. We did not drink Bourbon, but
blood. No matter how gentle or womanly
we might be, we read, we talked, we thought
perforce of nothing but slaughter. So many
hundreds dead here, so many thousands
there, were our last thoughts at night and
the first in the morning. The effect was
very like that produced upon a household in
which there has been a long illness. There
was great religious exaltation and much
peevish ill temper. Under the long, nervous
strain the softest women became fierce partisans,
deaf to arguments or pleas for mercy.

Nothing would convince some of the most
intellectual women in New England that
their southern sisters were not all Hecates,
habitually employed in flogging their slaves;
while Virginia girls believed that the wives
of the men who invaded their homes were all
remorseless, bloodthirsty harpies.

We no longer gave our old values to the
conditions of life. Our former ideas of right
and wrong were shaken to the base. The ten
commandments, we began to suspect, were
too old-fashioned to suit this present
emergency.

I knew, for instance, of a company made
up of the sons and grandsons of old Scotch
Covenanters. They were educated, gallant
young fellows. They fought bravely, and in
the field or in hospital were kind and humane
to their foes. But they came home, when
disbanded, with their pockets full of spoons
and jewelry which they had found in
farmhouses looted and burned on Sherman's
march to the sea; and they gayly gave them
around to their sweethearts as souvenirs of
the war.

The poet, Colonel Paul Hayne, told me
that after the war was over he had a letter
from a man in New York stating that he had
several pieces of the Hayne old family plate
and would like to know the meaning of the
crest and motto.

"To the victors belong the spoils," was
the excuse for all these things.

On the other hand, the natural high tension
of feeling in the whole nation during
those years made noble, heroic deeds easy.
Both armies were quick to recognize individual
acts of courage in their foes and to be
proud of them because they were done by
Americans.

I remember that an old Confederate soldier
once told me of the death of Theodore
Winthrop, a gallant northern officer, famous
before the war began as the author of two
remarkable novels.

"Winthrop's regiment," he said, "was
driven back. But he would not be driven
back. He rushed forward alone to the top
of the hill, sprang upon a fallen tree, and
waved his sword, shouting to his men to

follow. They did not follow. A dozen bullets
pierced his breast. He swung to and
fro, still shouting. I never saw a more heroic
figure. When he fell a groan burst from the
Confederate ranks. It was the death of a
great soldier." And the tears stood in his
old eyes, though many years had passed since
he saw the boy die.

It may be that the glow of love for their
country which on both sides then warmed
men's hearts made kindly and noble deeds
easier to them. But they were common
enough through all the long brutality of
slaughter.

There was one regiment, for instance,
which, after a battle in the West Virginia
mountains, near Romney, came up to a
burned farmhouse; the owner, a young
countryman in a gray uniform, lay dead
in the barnyard. His wife crouched beside
him, his head in her arms. They found that
she, too, was dead, shot through the breast.
Near by sat a boy baby, two years old, who
looked into their faces and laughed. This
reads like a cheap story from the Sunday

papers, but it is a fact. The men took the
child with them and cared for it on their
march. The only food they had fit to give
it was hard-tack, soaked in milk, and it throve
and grew fat on the queer diet under the
care of its many foster fathers. A year later
they brought the boy to Pittsburg and put
him into an orphan asylum. He had no
name but Hard-Tack, but he was rich in
friends.

The hospitals, the care of the sick and
wounded, kindled innumerable fires of
sympathy and friendship in the midst of the
universal enmity.

During those years of fierce struggle
some little incident hourly showed how knit
together at heart were the "two huge armed
mobs," as Von Moltke called them, that
were busy in slaughtering each other.

I remember a little story told me by
Colonel Thomas Biddle, which will show you
what I mean.

The colonel, then a young man on the
staff of one of the Federal generals, - which,
I have forgotten, - was ordered one day to

reconnoitre the country lying around the
camp, which was near Culpepper. He rode
far into the hills until late in the afternoon,
and, being hungry, stopped at a lonely farmhouse,
tied his horse to the fence, and went
in.

A raw-boned woman welcomed him.

"You're for the Union, eh?" she said.
"So are we. Lookin' up the Secesh troops,
I reckon. No, there's none of them about
hyah. Teddy, see to the gentleman's horse."

"If I have a weakness for anything it's
for buttermilk," the colonel said, in telling
the story. "And this was fresh, the butter
floating in yellow flakes on top, a drink for
the gods. I sat and ate and sipped it slowly,
and she watched me with her beady black
eyes.

him! An' I've brought the men on you!
Go! Foh God's sake! They'll shoot you
for a spy - go! Thah they are!'

"I looked out of the window. A dozen
mounted men were galloping up through
the gorge.

"I rushed out of the house, threw myself
on my horse, and dashed down the glen. I
heard her yell: -

" 'I did n't know! Oh, make haste! Foh
God's sake!'

"I drew my pistols from the holster, but
they were dripping wet. Teddy had seen to
that before he warned the rebels, whose camp
was just behind the hill.

"Well, it was a hard race, but I won it.
They fired a dozen bullets after me. I had
good luck and reached the camp. It's queer,
but from that day to this I can't taste buttermilk
without a sick qualm at the stomach."

This story, too, sounds like a bit out of a
novel. But I give it exactly as the colonel
told it to me.

There was another curious incident which
I know to be true in every detail.

A young man named Carroll enlisted in a
Michigan regiment which, the next day, was
ordered to Virginia. He had no kinsfolk but
a sister, a young girl, who was neither mad
nor an idiot, but was what the kindly Irish
call "innocent." They believe that such
half-witted, harmless folk are under the especial
guardianship of God.

When Ellen was told that her brother had
gone to the war, she followed him as a matter
of course.

"Why, Joe could n't get along in those
strange countries without me," she said.
"Who would cook for him, or take care of
him?"

She had but a few dollars, and soon lost
them in the cars. She carried nothing with
her but a little bag filled with Joe's neckties
and bits of finery which she thought he would
need.

"I will see him to-morrow, and he will buy
me clothes and all I want there," she said.

This pretty, innocent girl traveled in safety
thousands of miles, alone and penniless, and
when she reached the Virginia mountains,

wandered on foot from camp to camp, searching
for her brother, always safe and unharmed.

In the universal hurry-burly and overturn
of order in the country, all kinds of eccentric
folk rushed into notice to fill the public eye
for the moment and then to disappear. Every
day brought a new preacher who had gone up
to heavenly places the night before, and who
could give us the exact opinion of Washington
or Moses or St. Paul upon the war and its
probable ending.

Men and women whose eccentric ideas had
been smothered hitherto, now blazoned them
forth unchecked; or, if they had a gift for
leadership or organization or for making
money, the field, the spectators, and the reward
all now were ready for them.

I knew one lad of sixteen who had saved,
dime by dime, a couple of hundred dollars.
When father and brothers were rushing, guns
in hand, to the battlefield, he sat down to
calculate how he could invest his money
profitably.

He hurried out, spent every penny in
turpentine, stored it for four years, and with
the profits laid the foundation of a huge
fortune.

A townsman of the turpentine lad had not
his idea of glory. He was the scampish fellow
of the town. No family nor church ever
fathered or trained him. He made up his
mind to take part in the war, single-handed.
He had a good horse and got a commission
as colonel from the Confederacy, donned the
gray uniform, and rode through the Virginia
border, leaving a trail of terror behind him.
At last, in Moundsville, on the Ohio, he met a
little Federal captain who had brought down
$20,000 to pay the troops of the Mountain
Department, and was talking about it too
loudly. Jem held up the little man, took his
money, turned it into the southern treasury,
and, worst of all, sent the poor boy home on
parole, to fight no more for his country.

I think nobody has described, was the hopeless
confusion which followed its close. When
Johnny came marching home again he was
a very disorganized member of society, and
hard to deal with. You cannot take a man
away from his work in life, whether that be
selling sugar, practicing law, or making shoes,
and set him to march and fight for five years,
without turning his ideas and himself
topsy-turvy.

The older men fell back into the grooves
more readily than the lads, who had been
fighting, when, in ordinary times, they would
have been plodding through Cicero or
algebra. Some of them harked back to college
to gather up the knowledge they had missed;
some of them took up awkwardly the tools of
their trades, and some of them took to drink
and made an end of it. The social complications
of the readjustment were endless and
droll.

I remember that a friend
of mine, a venerable,
gray-haired college professor, when hearing
a class of freshmen at the beginning of
the term in 1866, was struck by the peculiar

hoarse voice of a boy from the South. When
the class was over, he said to him, "I beg your
pardon, but do you know Cato's Soliloquy?"

"Yes, sah," the
lad said, blushing. "It is
my favorite recitation."

"Do you remember
that two years ago you
were detailed to guard a sheep-pen in a Texan
camp in which were some Yankee prisoners?
It was a moonlight night, and as you marched
up and down you thundered out: -

'Plato, thou reasonest well,
Else why this pleasing doubt' " -

"I've no doubt I
did," said the Texan.
"But how - Where were you, sah?"

"Oh," said the
old doctor, "I was in the
pen."

The effervescence
simmered down at last.
Men standing up as targets to be shot at
were all of one height, but in peace each
gradually found his level again.

The abolition of slavery
is the only result
of this great war which we recognize. But
there were other consequences almost as
momentous.

The first huge fortunes in this country
were made by army contractors in the North
during the war.

The birth of the millionaire among us, and
the disease of money-getting with which he
has infected the nation, is not usually reckoned
among the results of the great struggle.
But it was a result, and is quite as important
a factor in our history as is the liberation of
the negro.

Another more wholesome effect of the long
quarrel was oddly enough that it made of us
a homogeneous people, which we never had
been before. The Pennsylvania Dutchman
and the Californian learned to know each
other as they sat over the camp-fire at night,
and when the war was over they knew the
Southerner better and liked him more than
they had done before they set out to kill
him.

Another good result was, that while the five
years of idle camp life and slaughter made a
sot of many a coarse-grained, stupid boy, and
a pauper for life of the man willing to take
alms from the country to whom he once gave

paid service, it uplifted the whole lives of such
men as went into it with a noble purpose.

When it was over, the farmer, the salesman,
the shoemaker, took up the dull burden
of his workaday life again, and carries it still.

But he never forgets that for five years
he, too, was Achilles - of the race of heroes.
The fact that for one mile in his long journey
he worked, not for money, but for a great idea,
must be for him always a helpful and uplifting
memory.

VI.
THE SHIPWRECKED CREW

I MUST plead guilty to a
liking for those
disreputable folk, the half-starved, scampish
adventurers who haunt the outer edge of the
fields of literature and journalism; for these
fields march together now and the fence
between them is almost broken down.

Your real geniuses - the accredited rulers
in these demesnes - are not always people
with whom you can fellowship. You stare at
them, or save their autographs, but you don't
ask them home to dinner or to go a-fishing with
you for a long July day. One reason is, that
many of these important folk have been too
long aware that the public eye is upon them,
and their self-consciousness covers their real
selves as would mask and domino. Who can
blame them? How can any man be his real
self or indulge in any lovable, foolish capers
when he knows that a dozen reporters of the

Another reason is that you yourself have
illusions about these men of genius. They are
not always on the tripod, and you resent it
when you see them off of it. A poet has
sung to you like the lark at heaven's gate,
and when you meet him he is babbling of his
cook and of a new sauce for crabs. Or you
meet that famous novelist whose book was
one of the successes of last century, and he
talks to you by the hour of his own incomparable
genius, and assures you gravely that he
has put Scott and Thackeray to shame. Or
you are asked to dine with the woman whose
songs have reached dark places in your heart,
which you thought were known only to you
and to God, and she giggles in her talk, and
uses perfume, and poses even while she eats,
as a conscious Sappho.

Now, it hurts you to see these priests of
Apollo thus stripped of their proper gleaming
vestments and going about in such cheap
clothes. Their every-day dullness or under-breeding
makes you forget their inspired moments,

and you end by ungratefully denying
the help which they actually have given to
you.

It is a good rule never to see or talk to the
man whose words have wrung your heart, or
helped it, just as it is wise not to look down
too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes
shines on your path on a summer night,
if you would not see the ugly worm below.

But the poor unknown scribbler outside of
the gates of literature has no reputation to
keep up. He need not pose. Nobody mistakes
his old hat for a halo. You have no illusions
about him; nothing that he can do will
disappoint you. He can afford to be his own
tricky, fascinating self.

Although there are scores of biographies
and portraits of our American Immortals, the
famous folk who publish books and draw royalties
and write autographs for church fairs, nobody
has sketched those uneasy, unsuccessful
ghosts who haunt the gates and hedges of the
scribbling world; always outside, yet always
hoping to enter in. I must tell you of one or
two of them whom I have known.

I remember a chubby schoolgirl of sixteen,
who once brought to me the manuscripts of
several philosophic essays which she wished
to have published "at once."

"What was your object in writing them?"
I asked, to gain time.

"Partly," she said sententiously, "to make
a large sum of money, and partly to improve
the age."

Few of these queer folk, however, have both
of these motives. They either mean to wring
a living out of the public or they propose to
reform it, with the fervor of the apostles and
as firm a faith in their own genius as ever
martyr had in his God.

One of this last class was a woman from
the mountains of Georgia who called on me
one winter's day years ago. She was lean and
crippled, and talked with the broad negro
inflections of the quarters.

But she had escaped from the mountains.
She had reached a city. She was on her way
to storm Olympus, and had put on her best
gown for the adventure, a faded green silk
decorated with bows of washed yellow ribbon.

She pulled at them nervously as she looked
at me with excited pale eyes, her jaws
twitching.

"I am on my way to New York," she began
at once. "I mean to go into the profession
of authorship there. I expected to be paid
some money here in Philadelphia for a poem
of mine which was printed in the 'Church
Lamp.' But when I arrive here, I find the
'Church Lamp' has not been published for a
year. It has gone out! No office, no editors,
no 'Lamp'! No money for me! And I
have no money - none at all;" waving her
empty hands and laughing. "I thought that
perhaps authors had a guild - a beneficial
society to help each other with loans?" -

I quickly assured her that I never had
heard of such a league, and asked her how
she proposed to carry on life in New York
with no money at all. Why not go home?

"Home!" she said. "Turn back! Why!
I am an authoress. You don't understand,"
she explained patiently, tapping the sides of
a little satchel. "Poems!" she whispered,
nodding with shining eyes.

I hinted that New York editors did not
stand upon their doorsteps with money in
their hands waiting for poems. But she
smiled at my ignorance.

"You forget that I am not an ordinary
authoress," she said quietly. "I have been
preparing for this for many years. I have
great power. I have genius. Everybody
in our county will tell you that. I have
genius. I have several of my best poems
here;" and again she touched the old satchel.

Well - remonstrance was useless. She
went to New York, and no word or sign
came back from her.

Years afterward I spent an evening with
Mrs. Ann S. Stephens - the Scheherazade
of her generation, and probably the kindest
woman in it. We were talking of the queer
folk who followed her craft. I told her of
the Georgian poetess. Her face flushed, but
she said nothing. But a friend who was
dining with us exclaimed: "Why, that is
Inez Black. She is living with Mrs. Stephens
now! She was invited to luncheon one day
a year ago and she never went away!"

There was no such doubt with regard to
Fräulein Crescenz Wittkampf, a fat, fair,
pink-cheecked German who once descended
upon us. She was one of those modern
women who are ready to seize the occasion
- to seize any occasion by the bridle, mount
it and ride it to victory.

Some good nuns in a convent in Alsace
near the hut where she was born had recognized
this power in the child, and taught her
other things than embroidery - among the
rest, English. When she was in her twenties
there was a World's Fair in Paris. She
went to it as saleswoman of some work of
the Sisters. While there she quickly made
friends. One of them, an Englishwoman,
offered her fair wages to go to India as
nurse and companion to the daughter of an

English officer stationed in Bombay. The
girl was a child of twelve. Crescenz rejoiced
at her good luck and set sail with her charge.
Not until they were two days out at sea did
she discover that the child was subject to
violent paroxysms of madness. However,
when she reached Bombay she was mistress
of the girl and of the situation. She remained
in India long enough to concoct a book
made up of her imaginary dealings with
Catholics and Hindus. It was highly seasoned
with horrors and indecencies, but it had a
religious title and was a savage attack upon
the followers of the Pope and of Buddha.

Crescenz reaped a good harvest from it.
She was expert, too, in making friends with
notable people, - statesmen, popular preachers,
millionaires, and fashionable women.
Something in her round, innocent face, her
China-blue eyes and her childish gurgle
went to the hearts of most women and all
men. They almost always gave her presents,
usually in money. When they did not give
she would begin to chatter of another book
which she was writing, "Glimpses of Life in

the Great Republic," and the personal
anecdotes with which she would season it. "A
little dingy, some of them. But for the sake
of art, one must use one's friends, eh?"
They would laugh uneasily and call her
"a flighty, inconsequent child; but not
vicious? Surely, not vicious?" But they
always gave her money, to be safe.

No doubt the little rose-tinted girl was at
heart a blackmailer, rending her prey for her
food, merciless as a wolf.

But there are drops of red blood under even
the wolf's hide.

One of our good friends, years ago, was
Dr. J. G. Holland, who, more than any other
American writer, fed the young people of the
States through his prose and verse with the
distilled essence of common-sense. He had
incessant disputes with me about almsgiving,
I upholding the ancient lax methods of the
good Samaritan, who, out of his own pocket,
helped the man fallen by the wayside, not
inquiring too closely as to his character. The
Doctor maintained vehemently that all alms
should be given through the agents of the

Organized Charity Boards, and then only
after close examination, to those whom they
found worthy. Hence I laughed a little one
day when I received a letter from him inclosing
a large cheque, and asking me to call on
a Mrs. Lamb who had written to him from
Philadelphia, a widow with four children,
starving in a hovel, who had, she said, once
sung with him in a choir in Springfield. "I
don't remember her," he said, "but no doubt
she tells the truth. Will you see her, and if
you think it right give her this and let me
know what more ought to be done for her?"

I found the house to which she directed
him to be no hovel, but one of a row of high
showy dwellings near Logan Square. The
Quaker town of late years has filled up
with these sham fashionable houses. A film
of brownstone hid the brick front, wooden
towers rose above the eaves, the tiny hall was
chocked by a huge imitation bronze Hercules,
with a cotton-lace shade on his back,
holding a lamp. Just as I reached the house
a smartly dressed nursemaid brought a baby-wagon
down the steps. A chubby, blue-eyed

child of three years looked out smiling from
the fluffs of white chiffon and rose silk. An
old, lean woman in a soiled print gown, with
no collar, an untidy wisp of gray hair knotted
up on her head, anxiously helped the
nurse carry down the wagon, and watched
the baby out of sight with an eager glow of
delight on her face. Then she turned to me.

"A very pretty baby!" I said.

"Yes." She had the sharp, furtive eyes of
a rat watching its enemy. But they softened
a little. "It's mine," she added.

"Yes. And you are Mrs. Lamb? I have a
letter of yours which I have come to answer.
To Doctor Holland."

"Holland? Oh - yes. Come in." She stared
at me perplexed and whispered to herself as
we went up the steps.

Afterward I understood her perplexity.
She was a begging letter writer by profession
and sent off dozens of appeals a day to
prominent people whose names she found in the
newspapers. Who was "Holland," and which
story had she told him?

fat, bloated young man was lolling on a
sofa. "This is my husband," she said, "Mr.
Augustus Lamb. He is a sculptor. You
may have heard of him?"

Augustus threw down his torn novel and
glanced uneasily at the breakfast tray beside
him and the unmade bed in the next room.
"Yes, ma'am, I'm a sculptor. But I'll turn
my hands to any kind of honest work.
Except," - slapping his thigh and glaring at
me defiantly, - "except one. I'll never be a
bartender. I'll starve. But I'll not tend bar."

"Yes, yes, Augustus!" said his wife. "Go
out, now. This lady wants to see me alone."

"Certainly, Cora, if I'm not wanted" -
and he put on his high hat and swaggered
out.

I need not linger over the story which I
learned then and afterward. Cora Lamb was
probably the most successful beggar by letters
in this country. She had carried on the
trade for years. She had married this man -
who was young enough to be her son - and
supported him. They both were drunkards,
swindlers, and thieves. But their love for their

child was genuine. I think each of them
meant to keep her (it was a little girl, Mary
Regina) away from the other, that she might
grow up innocent and pure.

It is needless to say that Dr. Holland's
cheque was returned to him. But I was
interested in the Lambs and kept a distant watch
on them.

A month later Mrs. Lamb was arrested for
swindling. The charge was not proven, but
while she was in Moyamensing, Augustus
took all the money she had and the child,
and decamped. She followed him, found them
in a hotel in Chicago, attacked and stabbed
him and escaped with the baby. Then the
Lambs became a valuable property of the
reporters. Augustus brought suit for the child,
and when the courts gave her to him, managed
to elude his wife and placed the baby in
an institution near New York.

The rest of the matter is too ghastly for me
to linger to make a dramatic story out of it.
The half-crazed woman raced over the country
looking for her baby, and at the end of a
year found her. She obtained admission into

the institution as a servant, and at last escaped
with the little girl and took passage on a
Sound boat for New London. There was a
heavy fog that night, the boat collided with
another and sank, and hundreds of lives were
lost. My readers will no doubt remember the
incident, for the country shuddered with horror
at the accounts of it, and of the corpses
which covered the waves when the sun rose.
Among them was that of an old woman. She
had tied a child upon her breast, so that it
sat upon her dead body as upon a raft, and
so was saved.

So that was the end of my poor swindler
friend, Cora. Little Mary Regina, when they
untied her, cried to go back to her mother,
and sat down on the beach beside her again,
patting and kissing her cold face. Her father
claimed her and gave her again into the
charge of the good sisters.

But in the ragged, attractive regiment of
Disreputables that I have known, the most
attractive, and the most ragged as to morals,
was Evangeline Gasparé.

she was a Napoleon among militiamen,
a Salvini among barn-stormers. She preyed
upon organizations, not individuals, and so
masterly were her tricks that even her victims
paid her a grudging homage. When she
operated in England, the "Times" and
"Saturday Review" in leading articles anxiously
warned the public against the Queen of Adventurers,
as if she were a new pestilence which
was creeping into the country.

And who was Evangeline Gasparé? Ah,
who ever knew? The pastor of a wealthy
church in New York believed her to be the
Irish widow of an Italian prince, a devout
little Protestant whose only hope was to rescue
her boy from the hold of his uncle, who
was a cardinal, and to fit him for the
Presbyterian ministry. This church supplied her
regularly with funds.

Mr. Moody believed her to be a zealous
Methodist detailed by certain Dissenters in
England to report his work in this country.
She followed him around over the States,
and for months in his great mass meetings a
little woman in gray was conspicuous. Some

of my readers may remember her. She sat
near Mr. Sankey and sang the old hymns with
a voice pathetic as Scalchi's, and a rapt, lovely
face - often with tears. The newspaper
reporters in Philadelphia knew her as the regular
correspondent of the "London News."
They made a comrade of her, gave her tickets
to the theatres, heaped Christmas gifts on the
boy. She used to ask them to gay little
suppers, and sang drinking songs to them as
fervently as hymns; being quite in earnest
in both.

But Madame Gasparé did not drink, and
was as chaste as ice. The whole of the seven
devils seldom enter into one woman. Evangeline
led no man into vice. But she told
each of these young fellows confidentially
the name of the noble English family to which
her husband had belonged, and the story of
the suit now pending to establish her son's
claim to title and estates, and stripped the
credulous boys of every dollar that they could
raise, to pay her lawyers.

The weakness of the little woman was
that the credulity of her victims soon bored

her. She yawned in their faces and threw up
each successful scheme to try another.

In Washington, one winter, she held a
salon which was frequented by the ultra
friends of the negro in Congress. So fervent
was her zeal for the Freedman that she
delivered for his benefit a public eulogy on
Charles Sumner, then just dead, and in the
fresh glow of its great success advanced on
Philadelphia to be adopted and caressed by
the kindly Quaker Abolitionists of that city.
This adventure paid more in honor than in
money, and during the winter of 1875 poor
Evangeline sometimes was hungry.

It was then that I first saw her. An old
clergyman sent her to me, introducing her as
"a pious woman who had done noble work
for the Freedmen. In her temporary
embarrassment, I probably could suggest some
employment," etc., etc. I found a little woman
waiting for me who, in the first instant, made
a singular impression of good-breeding and
candor. She wore a simple, perfectly made
gray dress and hat.

she said, in a low voice. It was an unusual
voice, with a pleading note in it that reached
your heart, as if a hurt child or a cripple
spoke. "I am in a temporary strait. And he
suggests that I shall - knit men's socks!"

She looked at me, her dark blue eyes
gleaming with fun. One's heart warmed at
sight to the innocent face - the candid eyes,
the trembling lips.

I saw Evangeline Gasparé many times
after that, knowing what she was. But the
honest, confiding eyes and sensitive mouth
never lost their power over me, woman
though I was.

In the straits that followed during that
winter she robbed a certain Mr. Smith of a
small sum of money, and was found out. But
her eyes and voice had power enough over
Smith's kind heart to induce him to withdraw
the charge against her.

On the opening of the Centennial Exposition,
in May, some of her friends in the
Senate came up and took her with them to

the little high platform on which stood the
most distinguished guests. Now, poor Mr.
Smith, as it happened, was among the crowd
of nameless folk below who were driven back
by the police from even the outer court.
What was his rage on looking up to see
Madame Gasparé, in an exquisite costume,
standing aloft, beaming with smiles, beside
the Emperor of Brazil and General Grant!

He lost all control of himself and shouted:
"Send that thief down! She robbed me of
twenty dollars!"

Evangeline's eyes did not blench, nor her
quiet voice falter. But in a moment she
disappeared and this country knew her no more.

Three years later the English papers
contained an account of the death of Admiral -,
aged seventy, who had bequeathed the
whole of his personal property to his adopted
daughter, Evangeline Gasparé, "the orphan
child of Ralph Gasparé, an Irish captain who
had lost his life in the American Civil War,
a volunteer in the southern cause."

The heirs brought suit to break the will.
They broke it; they searched out the little

woman's history, producing the dead husband,
and the living son, whom she had comfortably
hidden in a school in Switzerland.

Evangeline was tried for perjury. The rank
of the contestants, the infatuation of the poor
old admiral, and the singular beauty and
charm of the prisoner, made of the case a cause
célèbre. Twice during the trial Evangeline
started up and made impassioned appeals to
the judge. He was English and slow of
apprehension and of tongue. Before she could
be silenced, the innocent eyes and wonderful
voice had done their work. She was found
guilty, but sentenced to only two years'
imprisonment. The English newspapers jeered
at her for her stupidity in keeping her lubberly
son almost within sight while she played
her desperate game, and for her obstinate
refusal to become the wife of the old admiral.

Three years later I saw in the report of a
Southampton police court that Evangeline
Gasparé had been arrested for stealing six
shillings.

But I am sure, whatever may be the depths
into which she has sunk, in this world or in
any other, there is one clean chamber in her
soul. She has been true to her boy and to
her woman's honor.

More than that. Of all these tricky folk,
and many other poor vagabonds whom I have
seen shipwrecked and lost upon the shores of
life, there was not one who did not have some
honest fibre in his soul, - a high belief, a
pure affection, - some rag of a white flag to
hold up in God's sight as he went down.

VII.
A PECULIAR PEOPLE

WHEN I was young,
although I lived in a
slave State, chance threw me from time to
time in the way of some of the leading
Abolitionists, the men and women who then were
busied in sowing the seeds whose deadly
outgrowth was the Civil War.

To make you understand them, we need
not discuss the great issue which tore the
country asunder. But I must remind you that
they were for years a small band, a Peculiar
People. The great majority of northerners,
a large minority of southerners, including
many slave-owners, recognized slavery as an
evil, and hoped to free the country from it by
gradual and legal methods. But these Radicals
would not temporize nor wait. "Abolish
the evil now; cut out the cancer now, at any
cost," they cried.

of to-day to understand the fury of zeal
which fired this little band, or the hate and
horror with which they were regarded in the
South. We have grown more tolerant nowadays,
both as to beliefs and individuals, and,
it may be, more indifferent to great issues.
We suffer any man now openly to exploit
his opinions; whether he preach anarchy or
monarchy, heathen gods or no God, his worst
punishment is a shrug of contempt.

But in the fifties the Abolitionist crossed
Mason and Dixon's line at the peril of his
life. His errand was supposed to be either
abduction or murder.

Now, however, the grandchildren of these
hot-blooded, warring folk in both South and
North are curious to know what the men were
like on either side who fought the war.

It is a natural curiosity. Even the heroes
of the old Greek legend whose hate was so
strong that their souls went on fighting for
four days after their bodies were dead, must
surely, after a few years of leisurely rest in
Hades, have felt a curiosity as to what kind
of men their enemies really were, and have

Some such late rueful doubt is stirring now
in the hearts of the old foes, and warming
them to a wholesome, friendly heat.

I certainly never found the mark of Cain
on the foreheads of these reformers, which
their fire-eating neighbors declared was there;
nor did I see the "aureoled brows of warrior
saints," which Lowell and Whittier sang.
They were men and women, alike fired with
one idea, - the freedom of the slave. They
preached it, they prayed for it, in season
and out of season. They would not eat sugar
nor wear cotton. Some of them gave up God
himself because he had tolerated slavery.
They were generally regarded as madmen
running about with a blazing torch to destroy
their neighbors' homes. But their frenzy was
usually recognized as an unselfish madness.
They certainly gained nothing by carrying the
torch. No man was ever more relentlessly
denounced or ostracized than was the
Abolitionist, even in the North.

confess that, apart from this common uplifting
motive, there was in every man and woman
of the little sect a touch of eccentricity, no
matter what their station or breeding. They
were always, in popular opinion, "queer." It
was the old story of Doctor Johnson's twenty
cups of tea, of Shelley's paper boats, or Jean
Paul's soiled jacket. The man who rebels
against an established rule, from Absalom to
Paderewski, feels that he must wear his hair
down his back. The man who makes war
upon the world's great ordinances always picks
a quarrel with its harmless little habits, even
decencies. When the Florentine noble dared
want and death to bring the sacred fire from
the Holy Sepulchre to the altar of his little
church at home, he preached an immortal
lesson to the world. But why need he have
ridden with his face to the horse's tail, so that
the common people called him "Pazzi" -
fool?

Why, because these good folk wanted to
free the slaves, should they refuse to cut their
beards or to eat meat, or have run after new
kinds of fantastic medicines or religions?

But so it is. Your chivalric reformer, your
holy saint, almost invariably fights obstinately
about some absurd trifle, which makes the
purblind public call him Pazzi. You may safely
take his thoughts as bread for your soul, but
generally you will find him a nuisance at
dinner or on a journey.

I remember, too, that when you were with
the Abolitionists you were apt to be kindled
at first by their great purpose, but after a
while you were bored by it. They saw nothing
else. Like Saint George, they thought that
one dragon filled the world.

Their narrow fury angered you. "Is the
Devil dead?" you said. "What of his old
works? What of drunkenness and hate and
lies? Let us talk of these, too." But they
ignored them all.

However, I suppose that the party or sect
which is to do any work in the world must
breathe its own peculiar atmosphere, speak
its own little patois, and see but one side of
the question on which it fights.

My family lived on the border of Virginia.
We were so to speak, on the fence, and could

see the great question from both sides. It was
a most unpleasant position. When you crossed
into Pennsylvania you had to defend your
slave-holding friends against the Abolitionists,
who dubbed them all Legrees and Neros;
and when you came home you quarreled with
your kindly neighbors for calling the
Abolitionists "emissaries of hell." The man who
sees both sides of the shield may be right, but
he is most uncomfortable.

One of the familiar figures to my childish
eyes during these yearly visits to Pennsylvania
was F. Julius Le Moyne, the candidate
for Vice-President in 1840 on the Abolition
ticket with Birney. The two men offered
themselves to certain defeat, in order to test
the strength of their party. They polled only
a few thousand votes.

Francis Le Moyne was a physician in
Washington, Pennsylvania, then a sleepy village.
He was as unlike the townspeople as if Neptune
or Mars had put on trousers and coat and
gone about the streets. They were Scotch-Irish,
usually sandy in complexion, conventional,
orthodox, holding to every opinion or

custom of their forefathers with an iron grip.
He made his own creed and customs; he
was dark, insurrectionary, and French. He
was descended, I have been told, from an
émigré family from Brittany. Some of the
hunted folk of the ancien régime settled on
the Ohio at Gallipolis and tried fruit raising
there. The father of the reformer made
his way up to this quiet hill town. He
was a kind of fairy godfather to the village
children, because he spoke another tongue
than English and lived in a foreign-looking
house in the midst of a great garden of plants
and flowers unknown elsewhere. In his office,
too, he was always surrounded by uncanny
retorts and crucibles; and many birds flew
about him that he had taught by some secret
method to sing French airs.

His son was a large, swarthy man, with much
force of personal magnetism. He had, as I
remember, a singular compelling, intolerant
eye, which once seen you never forgot; the
eye of a man who, having chosen a cause to
serve, would give it the last drop of his own
blood and force other men to give theirs. The

cause he served was that of human freedom.
He drew many of his townspeople into the
Abolition party. But I think that they never
quite understood or appreciated him. He was
always alien to them. He should have lived
in a court, or a metropolis, some great arena
in which to work. He had the power for any
work. Doctor Le Moyne was probably the
truest representative of the radical Abolitionist
in this country. He never gave his
adherence to any temporizing or experiment
of expediency, whether made by Frémont,
Sumner, or Lincoln. "Cut out the cancer,
and cut it now,though the patient die," was
his creed. After the slaves were freed he gave
both his influence and money to the work of
their education.

Then he took up another reform -
cremation. The rotting bodies under ground
fretted him as much as the living slaves had
done. He urged the matter vehemently on
the American people, and built the first
crematory on this continent. Baron Palm, who,
with Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott,
was one of the first teachers in this country of

A year later I called at the doctor's office.
The sunny old room, with its bottles and
jars, familiar to me when I was a child, was
unchanged. So was my old friend, and the
curious charm of his courtesy and dignity.

"Joseph," he said presently, "hand me
that box from the top shelf."

The boy brought it. It was a gilt box
marked Cream Chocolates. Inside were
some charred bones.

"Olcott," said the doctor, "scattered Baron
Palm's ashes to the waves off Coney Island
with Buddhist rites. But these are his bones.
Put them back, Joe."

The doctor never threw lime-light effects
on his great ideas.

Abolitionism never was a burning question
in our part of Virginia. Nothing lay between
any slave there and freedom but the Ohio
River, which could be crossed in a skiff in
a half hour. The green hills of Ohio on
the other side, too, were peopled by Quakers,
all agents for the Underground Railway to

Canada. Hence the only slaves we had were
those who were too comfortable and satisfied
with us to run away. We knew "the institution"
at its best, and usually listened to the
furious attacks on it with indifferent
contempt.

The most vehement Abolitionist that I ever
saw, flamed into our horizon one July morning
in 1862. No other words will convey the
breathless heat of that man's zeal.

I must remind you that by that time the
Border States were one vast armed camp.
The few men here and there who had cried
out for arbitration or peace were either dead,
or dumb from fear. The whole country now
was given over to blood and fury. During
the first year of the war there had been a
good deal of terrified but friendly scuttling
to and fro across the border. Local politicians
made journeys to "use their influence
on the other side." Southern children were
hurried home from northern schools; helpless
women sought shelter with far-off kinsfolk.

and southern states were closed and
ramparted from end to end by armed men. No
passes could be obtained from either
Government. The man who tried to steal across
the line, no matter what his purpose, was
either shot on sight or hanged as a spy.

You can imagine my dismay then, when,
one sultry morning, I received a letter from
an Abolition leader in Boston, saying: -

"My friend, M. d'A. of Paris, a man eminent
in the scientific world of Europe, has
come to this country to aid the slave in
gaining his freedom. He is eager to reach the
South and begin his God-appointed work. I
have sent him direct to you, hoping that your
brothers will use their influence with some of
the southern leaders to enable him to travel
safely through the seceded states. If this is
not practicable, will you assist him to creep
through the lines in disguise? No doubt,
courtesy will be shown to a foreigner on
both sides."

Courtesy?

I remember that at that moment terrified
cries rose on the street. Some pretty young

girls had been arrested for strumming "Dixie"
on their pianos and were being led to jail.
For martial law had been declared in our
quiet old town at the beginning of the war.
The division of Virginia was planned there,
and the little city promptly was made the
capital of the new State. Nowhere in the
country, probably, was the antagonism
between its sections more bitter than in these
counties of Virginia which the North thus
wrested from the South - "for keeps."
Federal troops were hurried into Wheeling. The
stately old dwelling across the street from
our house was now the headquarters of the
Mountain Department, under General Rosecrans.
Some of our friends who were secessionists
were in an old theatre just in sight
which had been turned into a jail. Others
were in a prison camp on a pretty island in
the river. The change in the drowsy town
was like that made in those little vine-decked
villages on the flanks of Vesuvius after the
red-hot flood of lava had passed over them.
Nothing but gloom and suspicion and death
were real to us now. The range of mountains

just out of sight was alive with rebel
guerillas, quite as little minded to peace and
mercy as our guards.

And I was asked to send a foreign
slave-stealer safely through them!

At that moment his card was brought up.
I found in the drawing-room a large, bearded
man, who, in one excited minute, in a torrent
of broken English and breathless French,
told me that he had come from his own
country to the help of mine, that he "had
thoroughly mastered the situation in the
North, and now threw himself upon my
compassion, trusting to my hands to open the
gates of the South to him." He pulled out
packages of commendatory letters from
Horace Greeley, Sumner, and Lovejoy. It was
in vain that my father, whom I called to my
help, assured him that if one of these papers
were found on him in the South he would
be hanged to the nearest tree. He laughed
complacently.

"Ah! I have my plan!" he cried excitedly.
"Zere ees a little river near here - ze Kennywah.
I go to its shores. I dress in ze costume

of ze paysans. You will kindly have taught
me zeir patois. I buy a bateau. I row. I
sing ze chanson of 'Dixie' loudly. Zey
welcome me to zeir houses."

Argument was useless. For two days M.
d'A. fumed and planned. Then one of our
friends - a rebel and slave-owner, by the
way - took pity on him.

"I am going home to St. Louis, Monsieur,"
he said. "If you choose to come with
me I think you can make your way into the
South. The lines are not so tightly drawn in
Missouri as here. But I will not answer for
your safety when you pass them."

They started for St. Louis together. M. d'A.
sent his letters back to Boston, assuring us
loudly that he would "be silent and wary as
a serpent!" He was promptly arrested the
day he crossed the lines, and spent a year in
southern prisons and camps, but at last was
exchanged and sent to a military hospital in
Washington. There Lord Lyons, who was
appealed to, found him, worn out with want
and disease and disappointment. He hurried
home to France, and sent back grateful

The incarnation of the chivalric and noble
side of Abolitionism was John C. Frémont.
It had, like every cause, more sides than one.

Frémont had the ardent blood of a Frenchman
and a South Carolinian. He made of
Freedom a religion. I don't know that he
had any especial liking for the negro - very
few Abolitionists, by the way, had that. But
the slavery of the black man - of any man
- was abhorrent to him. He fought for the
freedom of the negro as he would have fought
for the Holy Sepulchre, or for liberty with
Kosciusko, or Kossuth, or Garibaldi.

He was so completely the Paladin, the ideal
knight, in his figure, his face, and his manner,
that you took a certain comfortable satisfaction
in knowing that he was in the right niche
in the world. One man, at least, had the work
in hand for which he was born.

His party clung to him with a passionate
loyalty.

"My creed is short," I once heard Sydney
Gay, the editor of the "Tribune," say: "I believe

He meant no irreverence. In that time,
when Americans were dying daily for each
other and for ideas, their words were apt to
be few and hot with meaning.

Nature, to begin with, had fitted Frémont
out physically as a hero. Sir Philip Sidney
was demeaned, we are told, in the eyes of the
vulgar, by his lean, big-jointed figure and
pimpled skin; but the American Sidney had the
carriage of a soldier and the face of a poet.
At first sight of him, the boy who blacked his
boots, or the woman who was his laundress,
felt vaguely that he was unlike other men -
a something bigger and finer, made for some
great purpose.

But if they talked to him, his singular
simplicity and courtesy usually soon convinced
them of his inferiority to themselves. The
average American demands a little pose and
strut in his great man. His hero must crow
and flap his wings before he will believe in
him.

brilliant prestige of the great pathfinder. At
the age when other young men are still studying
a profession, he had explored, on behalf of
the government, the unknown wildernesses
beyond the Rocky Mountains, had discovered
the Sierra Nevada, the great Salt Lake, and
had conquered from Mexico the vast region
of California and given it to the United States.

Later he had organized a great political
party, and in the free states, by the popular
vote (though not the electoral), had been
elected president of the United States.

No leader on either side, at the beginning
of the fight, had the fame, or the personal
magnetism, of Frémont, nor the passionate
adherence of so large a body of followers.

He never was accused of lack of courage
or ability, yet before the war was over he had
sunk into absolute obscurity.

Was ever luck so hard?

The first emancipator of the slaves, he
never received any honor or gratitude from
the negro race; a daring soldier and a
major-general, he lived in poverty for twenty-five
years without a pension; the man who had

given a vast realm richer than Golconda to
his country, he died, not owning a single foot
of ground to leave to his children.

No man surely has so short a memory as
the American.

One of his staff, by the way, once told me
of a little circumstance which throws light
upon the character of the man, and which I
have never seen in print.

General Frémont, on August 30, 1861,
in St. Louis, wrote the proclamation declaring
martial law in the State of Missouri, and
read it to his staff at night. The clause in
which the "slaves of all persons who shall
take up arms against the United States are
hereby declared free men," was preceded by
several explanatory paragraphs giving reasons
in justification for such grave action.

The document was discussed that evening,
but not signed. In the morning the staff
assembled again; Frémont came in and laid
the proclamation on the table. The introductory
apologetic Whereases were crossed out.

said quietly, "needs no apology. I will do
this thing simply because it is right."

His action was, as we all know, annulled
by Mr. Lincoln, and Frémont was soon relieved
of his command.

On looking back, there is one trait so
common to the men whom I have met who
achieved distinction that I am almost tempted
to suspect that the distinction was due to it.
That was - simplicity - the total lack of
posing, of self-consciousness.

Lincoln, Frémont, Agassiz, and Emerson
were direct in manner as children. So are
Grover Cleveland and Booker Washington
to-day. Having a message to give in life, these
men thrust it at the world straight, and let
their own selves and training shrivel back out
of sight.

This trait shows itself in such men by their
utter absorption in the present moment.
Some one said the other day of Mr. Cleveland:
"Whether he snubs the British lion or
catches a squeteague, he does nothing else.
- He is all there."

When he was the popular idol of the North
and had struggled ineffectually for months to
keep his place as leader in the army, he was
at last driven by injustice, as he believed, to
give up the struggle. He resigned his
command in Virginia and came home direct to
New York, arriving at midnight, to the horror
and despair of his friends and party. Right
or wrong, it was the crisis of his life, and he
had lost.

I happened to be at his house that night,
a young girl from the country, a most
insignificant visitor. But I was a stranger. I
never had seen New York, and I was his
guest.

He gave the next day to making a careful
map of the city and of the jaunts to country
and seaside, that I might "understand it all."
It was not a perfunctory duty. His mind was
wholly in it for the moment.

It may be egotistic in me to recall this
little incident. But he was the great man of
my youth, and he is dead.

I may at least say, like poor Jo, at the
grave: "He was very good to me."

If the great pathfinder was the incarnation
of the chivalric spirit of his cause, Horace
Greeley embodied as fully its exaggerated
phases.

I saw him first when I was a schoolgirl in
a little town in Pennsylvania. The lecturer
was then in the height of his career; he was
the new-found educator of the whole country;
every village waited breathless for him
to come and waken its sleeping intellect.
He came, incessantly. One week Holmes
read poems to us; the next Saxe gave us
puns; again we plunged into the mysteries
of buried Nineveh. On this night the little
church was crowded to the doors, and all
of the kerosene lamps blazed and smoked
joyfully. Every man in the town took the
New York "Tribune" and accepted it as
gospel, and Horace Greeley was believed
to write the whole of it, down to the death
notices.

And now, there he was himself, the great
northern prophet and leader! He stood

down in front of the pulpit, near to us. His
head was a round, shining ball, the few hairs
straggled wildly over it, his blue, round eyes
were those of a baby, his voice was a shrill
squeak. He was vehement from the first
sentence. He meant to help these young people,
and this was his one chance in life to do it.
His legs and arms wobbled continuously, as
though every joint were unhinged. At last,
in the height and paroxysm of his argument,
when he had clenched you, wrestling with
your reason as for life, he suddenly stopped,
and taking out a huge yellow bandana handkerchief
held it at length by the two corners,
and stooping down sawed it energetically
across his legs.

That was the end. And yet, so passionate
was his appeal, so fine and high the truth
which he had forced on us, that nobody
laughed. The audience dispersed in an awed
silence. As you went out of the hall
something choked your throat, and the hot tears
stood in your eyes.

Anecdotes of Horace Greeley's absurd and
childish doings circulated widely during his

life. Any vulgar scribbler or cartoonist could
point them out with giggles and hisses. Only
those who worked under him or knew him
well understood how great and sincere was
the soul beneath them. It belonged to his
temperament to be sensitive and easily hurt
as a child. There is no doubt that the
malignant ridicule heaped upon him during the
campaign in which he was a candidate for
the presidency, shortened his life.

After all, as far as the Abolition party was
concerned, the war was very like the tourney
in "Ivanhoe." One famous leader after
another came to the front, - Frémont, Beecher,
Greeley, - to be unhorsed by their own party
and carried from the field.

The struggle for command in the dominant
party during the Civil War was as hot
and relentless as it is to-day. During the
years immediately before the struggle began,
the Abolitionists naturally were abhorrent to
all the other parties.

There was one family, new-comers in our
little town, who were accused of being emissaries
of Garrison, I do not know how truthfully,

and in consequence were socially
tabooed. They were illiterate, noisy radicals,
believers in spiritualism, in divorce, and in
woman's rights. They lived in a little farmhouse
on the edge of the borough. In the
spring of 1859 a tall, gaunt old man visited
them, who came into the town sometimes,
stalking up and down the streets with his
eyes fixed and lips moving like a man under
the influence of morphia. After he had
disappeared, it was told that he was a poor farmer
from the West who was insane on the question
of slavery, and that he had brought a
quantity of huge pikes and axes to the house
of our new neighbors, with which the slaves
in town were to kill their masters whenever
there should be an uprising.

I remember how we all laughed at the
story. The children used to tease the old
black aunties and uncles to show them how
they meant to stab them with pikes or behead
them with axes when the day came. We
thought it a very good joke.

But five months later, when the old farmer
died at Harpers Ferry, on that bright October

day, the whole world looking on with
bated breath, the pikes were brought out of
hiding by his friends, who declared that they
never had meant to give them to the negroes
to use, and had thought the old man mad.

The race for whom he had made the pikes
certainly never would have used them. They
are not a cruel nor malignant people. During
the Civil War the women and children
of the South were wholly under the protection
of their slaves, and I never have heard
of a single instance in which they abused the
trust.

I married before the war was over, and
came to live in the North, where I met many
of the men and women who had kindled the
fire under the caldron.

In the flush of victory their motives and
their oddities came out more plainly. Wendell
Phillips had precisely that indefinable
personal dignity and charm which Horace
Greeley lacked; perhaps he had a little too
much of it as an orator. You were so interested
in the man that you forgot the cause
that he urged.

I saw him first when he came to Philadelphia
during the war, to fan the zeal of the
Quaker wing of his party to fiercer heats.
The audience was small, mostly made up of
gentle, attentive women Friends, who in their
white caps and dove-colored garments seemed
to make a band around him of moderation
and calm - virtuous but stifling. His brief,
fiery sentences fell into it and went out as
barbed arrows shot into a down cushion. When
he ended with a passionate appeal they looked
mildly at one another, nodded and smiled, and
a low "Um - um-m" of approval breathed
through the hall.

When the next speaker rose Mr. Phillips
found his way to the corner where we sat,
with the "world's people."

"Did you ever hear," he said abruptly, "of
Sarah Siddons' first appearance in Edinburgh?
She had heard that the Scotch were
a lethargic folk, and put forth all her powers
to move them. Lady Macbeth was so terrible
that night that she shivered with horror
at herself; but her audience sat calm and
dumb. In the sleep-walking scene she was

used, in London, to see the whole house rise
in terror; men would shriek and women be
carried out fainting. But now there was
unbroken silence, until an old man in the pit
chuckled and said aloud to his neighbor:
'Aweel, Sandy, that's nae so bad!'

"But the Philadelphians," he added, with a
forced laugh, "do not commit themselves as
far as that!"

Yet these identical dove-colored women
had lighted the torch which set the country
on fire. The headquarters of the Abolition
party was among the Philadelphia Quakers.
Here for years was the northern station of
the famous secret Underground Railroad, by
which thousands of flying slaves escaped.
The agent here was William Still, a grave,
shrewd negro, who died only two years ago,
leaving a large fortune which he had amassed
in trade.

The fugitive slaves came to him in every
kind of disguise and were hid until they could
be sent on to Canada. He published an account
of it all after the war was over. No
tragedy ever was more dramatic than these

records set down from day to day. The slaves
always gave him an account of themselves,
their masters and their families. One evening
came a couple of gray-haired old men,
brothers, who had escaped from Alabama.
They told him they had been sold when boys
by their master in Maryland. Their mother
and her baby were not sold. They never had
seen or heard of either of them again.

"What was your Maryland master's name?"
asked Still. They told him. He waited until
the room was clear.

"I am your brother," he said. "I was the
baby. But our mother is dead."

Another negro prominent in those days
among the Abolitionists was a Mrs. Frances
Harper, an able, ambitious woman, who
lectured with a strange, bitter eloquence.

Charles Sumner was often in consultation
with these Philadelphia leaders, but I never
happened to see him. Whittier also came,
and James Russell Lowell. But Lowell's
politics and poetry were, as a rule, kept
inside of his books. He himself in every-day
life was so simple, so sincere, so human, that

you forgot that he had any higher calling
than that of being the most charming of
companions.

Mr. Whittier, on the contrary, was always
the poet and the Abolitionist. He did not
consciously pose, but he never for a moment
forgot his mission. He was thin, mild, and
ascetic, looking like a Presbyterian country
minister. He gave his views of slavery and
the South with a gentle, unwearied obstinacy,
exasperating to any one who knew that there
was another side to the question.

I never saw a human being with a personality
more aggressive than that of Henry
Ward Beecher. No matter how crowded the
room might be, you were conscious only of
this huge, lumbering man in it, who was so
oddly unconscious of himself. He had too
big a nature for vanity. His brain was eager
and grasping. Whether the talk turned on
a religion or a bonnet, he caught the subject
with impatient force and tore the whole
meaning out of it. He was, too, more than
other people - human. He was indifferent
to nothing. Every drop of his thick blood

was hot with love or hate. He was an
Abolitionist, not so much from love of Freedom
as love of the poor black man himself. His
humor was that of Dooley, not Lamb. He
had the voice of a great orator; if you did
not know the language he spoke, the
magnetism in it would make you laugh or cry.

He had an enormous following of men and
a few women. But, back of the heavy jaws
and thick lips and searching eyes swathed
in drooping lids, back of the powerful
intellect and tender sympathy, there was a
nameless something in Mr. Beecher which
repelled most women. You resolved obstinately
not to agree with his argument, not
to laugh or cry with him, not to see him
again.

Perhaps it is ungracious in me to tell this.
But I cannot give the impression he made
without it. He was always Doctor Fell to
me, in spite of his strength and the wonderful
charm of his sympathy with every living
creature.

I met him first at a large dinner-party in
New York. He knew me only as a young

girl from the hills in Virginia, a friend of his
friends. But he heard me speak of certain
forgotten old hymns of which I was fond.

"Bring her to Plymouth Church next
Sunday," he whispered to my hostess.

There was an immense audience in the
great church that Sunday. The seats rose
as in a circus up from the pulpit; they were
all full and the aisles were packed with men
standing; at the back were the organ and
choir. During the service that great congregation
sang, one after another, every one of
the old hymns that I loved. The vast volume
of sound rose to Heaven as one soft, pleading
voice. I never shall forget that morning. The
incident shows the tact, the eagerness of the
man to be kind to everybody.

Then there were many Quaker women,
honest of heart, sweet of face, soft of speech,
and narrow in their beliefs, as only your
gentle, soft woman can be. Chief among
them was Eliza Randolph Turner, who first
invented the "Children's Week" charity, and,
later, founded and governed an immense guild
of working women in Philadelphia. She died

a year or two ago, and she cannot be now in
any other of God's worlds a more efficient
angel than she was here to poor shop women
and sick babies.

Her allies were Mary Grew and Margaret
Burleigh. The three dove-colored women lived
in a huge quiet house, surrounded by trees,
in Philadelphia. They preached and worked
together, close as Siamese twins. It never
occurred to any of them that they had come
into the world for any other purpose than to
reform it.

I remember that I was with Mary Grew
and her friend, Mrs. Burleigh, when the news
came of the final passage of the Fifteenth
Amendment The hope of their lives was
accomplished. But they were silent for a long
time.

"What will thee and I do now?" one said
to the other drearily. "There is prison reform?
Or we might stir up women to vote?"

They could hardly wait until the next day
to begin.

The queen bee of this buzzing swarm was
Lucretia Mott, one of the most remarkable

women that this country has ever produced.
Fugitive slaves, lecturers, reformers,
everybody who wanted help, and everybody who
wanted to give help, found their way to her
quiet little farmhouse on the Old York Road;
some were checked and some urged onward,
but all were cared for and helped. No man
in the Abolition party had a more vigorous
brain or ready eloquence than this famous
Quaker preacher, but much of her power
came from the fact that she was one of the
most womanly of women. She had pity and
tenderness enough in her heart for the mother
of mankind, and that keen sense of humor
without which the tenderest of women is but
a dull clod.

Even in extreme old age she was one of the
most beautiful women I ever have seen. She
was a little, vivid, delicate creature, alive with
magnetic power. It is many years since that
charming face with its wonderful luminous
eyes was given back to the earth, but it is as
real to me at this moment as ever.

I remember that once a southern woman
met Mrs. Mott at our house. With all

slaveholders she had been taught to abhor her as
the modern Borgia - the planner of war and
murders. When she caught sight of her as she
came into the room she gasped out, "Why!
she looks like a saint!"

She talked much to her during the evening,
and after she had gone said earnestly: "I
believe that that woman is one of the saints
of God!"

When you were with Mrs. Mott you were
apt to think of her as the mother and
housekeeper rather than as the leader of a party.
She came from Nantucket, and until the day
of her death kept up the homely, domestic
habits of her youth. She might face a mob
at night that threatened her life, or lecture
to thousands of applauding disciples, but she
never forgot in the morning to pick and shell
the peas for dinner. Her fingers never were
quiet. She knitted wonderful bedspreads and
made gay rag-carpets as wedding gifts for all
of her granddaughters.

She had, oddly enough, the personal
charm, the temperament, the hospitable
soul of a southern woman. I used wickedly

How she would have glorified her duty as
a slaveholder and magnified her office! And
how they would have appreciated her beauty
and charm down there!

We native Americans are of many opinions
- according to the place where we happen
to be born - but of one kin. Scratch
the skin of a slaveholder or an Abolitionist
and you find the same blood - and good
honest blood it is!

VIII.
ABOVE THEIR FELLOWS

I SHOULD like to tell you
something of a few
men whom I have happened to meet, - some
of the Hamans and Mordecais whom Americans
in the last century delighted to honor.
But remember, I am no politician, and no
seer into souls. I can give you no new
insight into their characters, nor any hints
which will make their work in the world
clearer to you.

The only hero known to my childhood was
Henry Clay. It would be impossible to make
this generation understand what the great
Kentuckian was to the country then. Americans,
now, are concerned about ideas or
things - Imperialism, Labor, the Trusts, or
the like. Then they cared for the individual
man. Clay, Webster, or Jackson, in their day,
was personally loved or hated with a kind of
ferocity.

None of our public leaders now wins that
worshiping, close allegiance from his followers.
There are several reasons for the blind
devotion of the American people, then, to
their leaders, and the lack of it to-day. The
nation was smaller then than now. It was
still made up of the three original families, -
the English Churchmen, the Scotch-Irish,
and the Puritans. The great flood-tide from
every nation under heaven had not yet set in
upon our shores. People knew each other;
they were neighborly, in the village sense of
the word. There were few newspapers and
no reporters. Public men could not speak
daily to the nation by telegraph, nor make
themselves known to it by their portraits in
every evening's edition.

They met their constituents face to face.
Even travel promoted this personal intimacy.
They did not go to bed in Philadelphia to
waken in Chicago. They jogged to and fro
in private conveyances or by stage-coach, and
so came to know every man and woman on
the road, and made themselves loved or hated,
as they cannot now do by print or telegraph.

What opportunities there were for quarrels
or confidences in the leisurely journeys on
the National Road - the one great highway
of the country! Men found each other out
in the long days of jolting side by side, or
during the nights in the inns which were set
along the road from Maryland to Indiana.
There the guests ate heavy suppers of venison
and bear steak and corn dodgers, and
gathered around huge fireplaces where a ton
of coal or whole logs of wood roared and
burned.

There was no more hearty companion for
these journeys than "Henry;" no one who
had a larger stock of stories, or who took or
gave a joke with finer humor.

In the village in which we lived Clay was
a demigod. To the women and children he
was not exactly human. I remember when I
was about five years old that I once heard
two planters from Kentucky discussing him
with my father.

"Harry," they said, "has wasted his chances.
If he had looked after his stock and let politics
alone, he would have been well-to-do to-day!"

I was cold with horror as I listened. If
they had attacked the Bible itself they would
not have seemed to me more blasphemous.
Henry Clay and cattle!

I had heard that this, the One Man, was a
personal friend of my father, and I felt that
all of the family, for that reason, took place
in the ruling class of the world. Long
afterwards I knew that every man in the village
was his intimate friend, and every other man
to whom he could talk for half an hour.

A lithograph of the one great man then hung
in every house in the South. I used to hold
my breath with awe when I chanced to look
at that ugly, powerful face. The black hair
swept back from the towering forehead, precisely,
I thought, as in the pictures of Olympian
Jove! The eyes concealed power greater
than that of a mere man - the sensitive chin,
the huge mouth, the cloak thrown back with
imperial grace - surely this was a being
much more than human!

Many rational men and women shared
then in my childish worship. No man probably
ever won such affection from the people

of this country as "Henry," as they loved to
call him. Sometimes it was "Harry," or
"The Mill Boy of the Slashes."

His journeys from his plantation in Kentucky
to Washington and back by slow plodding
stage-coach and boat were long panoramas
of cheering crowds.

The poorest river hand or red-faced farmer
who had ridden twenty miles "to see Clay
go by" felt a proud, personal ownership of
him, pored every week over his speeches in
the "United States Gazette" with hot, beating
pulses, or chuckled secretly as he whispered
to his neighbor stories of Clay's duels
or other doubtful doings.

"Henry will be Henry to the last!" he
would say fondly, as one speaks of the
brilliant, dear vagabond of the family.

An old friend, Mr. R-, once told me of
an incident very characteristic of Clay. When
he, R-, was a boy of ten, he was at work
alone late one evening in his father's office.

It was in a village on the National Road
through which the coaches ran from Washington
to the wilderness of the West. A tall

village during a presidential campaign in
which he was the popular candidate. Bands
played, the militia marched, oxen and sheep
were roasted whole, the entire county assembled
in a fever of excitement.

At last the great man appeared on a platform,
and the principal men of the county
were formally brought forward to be presented
to him.

Suddenly he stepped quickly to the edge
of the platform and beckoned to a small boy
perched on a tree across the field.

"Pardon me, gentlemen," he said, "but
there is a personal friend of mine whom I
must take by the hand."

"I went up," said Mr. R-, "my feet
like lead and my head on fire. He shook
hands with me and kept me beside him, his
hand on my shoulder, while the great men
were introduced. He was their leader, but
he was my friend. I am eighty years old," he
added solemnly, "and that was the proudest,
best minute of my life. From that day that
man was more to me than any other man."

me, "never forgot the face of friend or enemy.
He would take up you and your talk just where
you had left off with him years before."

The same man told me that Clay once visited
a little town in Pennsylvania after an
absence of ten years. He was on his way
to take his seat in Congress. It was a dark
winter's evening, but he was recognized as
he left the stage-coach and hurried into the
supper room of the inn. The news flew from
house to house that Clay was in town, and
every man in the village gathered in the hall
of the inn to see him as he came out The
burgess, a consequential little fellow, who had
once traveled as far as Washington City,
called out: -

"Form two lines, gentlemen! On either
side. I know him. I will present you to Mr.
Clay."

But just as the lines were formed the door
opened and a large man with heavy jaws and
keen black eyes stood an instant on the
threshold.

"Ah!" he cried, with beaming eyes, "here
is Wood! And Barnes! All my old friends!

Humphreys, too?" He passed down between
the lines, shaking hands, asking questions
and joking. There was not a man whom he
had met ten years before that he did not hail
by name.

At last he stopped. "Ah! Here's
somebody I don't know. Wait! One minute!"
holding the man by the hand and eying him
keenly. "That is a Pugh nose, I'll wager
my life! You are John Pugh's son! Ah?"

"That hit won the game," said the storyteller.
"There was a shout of delight, and
the crowd followed him to the coach cheering
until it was out of sight. Every man there
voted for him at the next election. Pugh
stumped the county for him. We felt that
it was a man with a brain like that who was
needed at the helm of state."

Another of our leaders - James G. Blaine
- possessed this abnormal memory for faces
and names. It was as useful to him as a sixth
sense. Behind it, too, in his case, there were
the warm heart and ardent instincts which
came to him from his Irish forefathers. He
won as devoted an allegiance from the nation

as did Clay. I don't believe, by the way, that
any man, be he statesman or writer or soldier,
ever has gained that passionate loyalty from
the public who did not have red blood at
heart and the boyish temperament.

When I was a schoolgirl in Washington,
Pennsylvania, James Blaine was a big,
ungainly law student in the same village. It
consisted then of a cluster of quaint stone
and brick houses built in colonial times, in
the midst of the rich farms and low-rolling
hills of western Pennsylvania. It is a
prosperous city now, but in the leisurely, calm
forties nobody thought of huge rivers of gas
hidden beneath the old dwellings and their
great gardens of Bourbon roses and
Canterbury bells.

A college and a girls' school then kept the
village alive and gave a scholastic flavor to
its talk and habits of thought. Old school
Calvinism was the dominant faith, and to the
kindly, slow-going, conservative folk the
unpardonable sin and hell were facts quite as
real and present as were their own borough
laws or little brick jail.

At the foot of the steep, grassy street stood
a gray, rambling house with wide porches in
front, and at the back there was a meadow
through which a sleepy brook crept. This
was the Blaine homestead. The family was
made up of two or three gentle, low-voiced
women and a troop of noisy young men.
They were popular with the villagers, and yet
were looked upon doubtfully by some of them.
Did not the women, thorough-bred as they
were, carry rosaries? Was there not a
Madonna on the walls?

But everybody liked one of the boys, -
Jim, a big, awkward collegian, with a joke and
a hearty word for even the gutter dogs. But
nobody expected the lazy, good-natured fellow
to make any mark in the world.

One of his old neighbors said to me lately:
"Even as a boy Blaine had a curious
magnetism and charm. I remember that one day
when I was a child I was bidden to draw
some fresh water. I was in a rage at leaving
my book, and finding the pail nearly full,
threw the water out of the door just as Jim
was passing, in his Sunday suit, on his way

to a party. He was drenched from head to
foot. I stood aghast and dumb; he turned
and hurried home. Presently he came back,
dry, but in his old clothes. He stopped and
nodded gayly.

" 'Don't worry, Will! I did n't care to go
to the old party, anyhow!' stopping my
stammering apologies by sitting down to joke
and laugh with me."

The trifling act shows the same kind heart
and unerring tact which enabled James G.
Blaine during so many years to control warring
elements in Congress as no other man
ever has done.

His good humor was imperturbable. A
rancorous western politician met him one
day on the steps of the Capitol with: "Mr.
Blaine, I am a stranger to you. But I take
the liberty of telling you that you are a fool
and a scoundrel!"

"Really?" said Blaine, lifting his hat.
"Now I wonder what you would have said if
you had been my intimate friend?"

Like Clay, Mr. Blaine had an enormous
following of friends. Both men had the royal

power of personal magnetism. Blaine's interest
in people was genuine and unaffected. If
he gave his hand to you he made you feel sure
that some of his heart went with it.

Some time, long ago, there had been an
intermarriage in our families, so that we
always - in the southern phrase - "called
cousins," and having this background of old
times and childish friends we kept up the
fiction of relationship through life, until we,
too, were old and gray.

During his busy years of public life when
on his way from Washington to New York
he would dodge committees and crowds at
the Philadelphia station and come to us for a
quiet hour or two of - "Do you remember?"
or "What has become of" this or that old
comrade?

He kept sight of all the poor, obscure
friends of his boyhood, and as I learned
elsewhere, he never, with all his burden of work
and worry, failed to help them or their children
when they needed help.

No doubt, in public life, Mr. Blaine may
have gilded the gold of his friendly impulses

by a little finesse. On one occasion when he
was to be the guest of honor at a large banquet
in Philadelphia, he asked my husband as we
sat at dinner, "What are the names of the
principal men that I shall meet to-night?"

They were told to him.

An hour later, when they were presented
to him, Blaine detained each with a look of
sudden keen interest.

"B-? did you say? There was a great
jurist B- in Philadelphia when I was a
boy - He stood in the highest court of
the temple while I was peeping through the
fence" -

"My father, sir." And B- passed on,
flushed and smiling.

"W-? Of English descent? I see it in
your features - the name, too. It goes back
to Elizabeth's time. Not from Leamington?
Why, you must be a descendant of the Bishop,
- the immortal W-?"

How did he know that the one weakness
of this W- was to be thought a descendant
of the famous Bishop? How, in that
brief hour after dinner, had he summoned

into his brain all the pleasant facts or fancies
that clung to the names of these strangers,
so that by a word he made them his allies
for life?

He altered very little during his life. When
he was the brilliant, popular college boy of
the village, he did not care a groat for the
honors which he won. When he was a candidate
for the presidency, beneath the able politician
was a melancholy idler, who at heart
did not care whether he ever entered the
White House or not.

I heard him say the week before the
convention met which meant to nominate him: -

"I am sick to the soul of the public and of
public life. I want a quiet home, my children,
and peace for my old age."

He meant it - on that day. The next he
was hard at work plotting for the nomination.

He came of an able, scholarly, sluggish
stock. He had the strong brain, the keen
perception, the unerring tact needed to control
masses of men - when he cared to control
them. The powerful engine was there, but
not always the fire to move it. He was pushed

forward and held back throughout his life by
the ambition or faults of his weak retainers.

I never happened to meet Edgar Allan
Poe, but during my girlhood I knew
intimately a family who had been among his
nearest friends in Richmond. They always
spoke of "Edgar" affectionately, as a loveable,
nervous man, who, like too many men of that
day, drank hard, and fell in and out of love
easily. They testified that he was a tender
son and faithful husband. "No woman," they
said, "was ever the worse for Poe's love."

One of his most loyal friends was Susan
Archer Talley, a young girl with whom he
corresponded for years. I was told, then, that
she preserved as her chief treasure a copy of
his works which he had given to her. The
margin of almost every page was covered
with his penciled criticisms of his own work,
usually sharp and bitter beyond measure.
Mrs. Talley Weiss is still living. She probably
knows what became of this book. It must
have been lost, for no collector could own
such a treasure now without boasting of it to
the public.

Poe's detractors, who never saw him,
asserted that even as a boy he was "a moral
monster," and was driven from the house of
his adopted father, Mr. Allen, on account
of some crime, "too horrible to record upon
any other register than that of Hell." My
friends, who had known him since his childhood,
stated that his worst fault was that he
occasionally came home drunk. Mr. Allen's
new wife naturally objected to this conduct.
A quarrel ensued, and the boy went out to
earn his own living.

After I came to live in Philadelphia, I
heard much of Poe from Charles J. Peterson,
who, as the editor of "Graham's Magazine,"
had known the poor Virginian intimately for
six years.

Mr. Peterson was not only a scholar, but a
man of the highest honor and sincerity. He
described Poe as "a most gentle gentleman,
always courteous, kindly, and honorable.
He had one very common failing and was
ashamed of it. His character was in no single
feature unnatural or abnormal." He said that
R. W. Griswold had for years a most intense

jealousy and dislike of Poe, and frequently
boasted to Mr. Peterson that he "had a rod
in pickle for that fellow." He never,
however, made any attack on Poe while he was
living, but as soon as he was dead, an article
charging him with being a soulless monster,
addicted to abnormal crimes, was written by
Griswold and published in the New York
"Tribune," actually before the poet was laid in
his grave. It is strange that the public should
have attached any importance to a slander
which was never spoken of the man while
living, but was poured out with inhuman
virulence upon his coffin the moment that the
lips were dumb that could have answered it.

Poor Poe, thinking that Griswold was his
friend, left a request that he should act as his
literary executor, thus giving him the power
to authoritatively belittle him as a poet, and
vilify him as a man.

We all know how brutally this power was
abused. For a generation the country was
made to shudder at this "large-brained
soulless creature, a unique bundle of inhuman
vices."

All this is over now, and Poe is fairly
judged. The world recognizes the fact that
he had the ordinary faults of his class and
time, and that nothing worse could be said
of him. In other countries he takes rank as
our greatest poet. Mr. Griswold is
remembered anywhere only as the man who belied
him.

Another poet whom popular prejudice
clothed with abnormal qualities was Walt
Whitman. His disciples regarded him as the
one bard of the century - the only one that
America has ever produced. His voice, they
declared, would be heard by all the listening
nations of the earth as he proclaimed universal
democracy, as one that chants at dawn in
the forests the coming of a new day. They
claimed, too, that he was not only the one
poet, but the chief Patriot of his age, the
universal brother of us all, with a heart
big enough to take whole races home to it,
and to still their hunger and pains in its
love.

Chief of these excited followers was William
O'Connor, a kindly, sincere man, who left his

cradle with his imagination at white heat and
never suffered it to cool afterwards.

He was a little man, who always wore a high
hat, and walked on tiptoe, and talked in superlatives,
and hurled defiance at the slave power
with every breath. He wrote a novel called
"Harrington," which he hoped would rout and
vanquish the South utterly. After the war
was over, he took a brief for Bacon vs. Shakespeare,
and became one of the Pfaff crowd of
Bohemians, a hater of orthodoxy, a dabbler
in all kinds of heresies. He made Walt Whitman
an idol, and sang pæans to the Good
Gray Poet with his whole being.

William O'Connor, however, calmed down
in his later years, and under the guardianship
of Sumner Kimball found a place in the
Life-Saving Service. Nobody could be long
factitious in the atmosphere of that most
sane, noble department of the government.
O'Connor did much quiet good work in it
before he left the world.

So profound was the faith of his devotees
in Whitman that they made incessant pilgrimages
to his house in Camden as to a shrine,

never coming away without laying gifts upon
the altar. When he died they paid homage
to the memory not only of the poet but the
man, saluting him as the "most eminent citizen
of the Republic." The shades of Confucius,
Buddha, and the Saviour were summoned
at his grave, to welcome their peer
into the heavens.

On the other side was a large, equally
unreasonable public, who believed Whitman to
have been a sort of devil. They denied him
any spark of divine fire; the poems which
his disciples regarded as immortal treasures
of inspiration they described as "dunghill
heaps of filth and corruption." They held the
man himself to have been a monster of vice.
He was discharged from the service of the
government, when a member of the Cabinet
read his poems, as promptly as a beast of
prey would be driven out of a village sewing
circle, and by special edict the poems were
forbidden circulation in the mails.

Surely a cool posterity will acknowledge
that this huge, uncouth fellow had the eye
and tongue of the seer. To him, as to Dante

and the oracle, it was given sometimes to be
spokesman for the gods, to talk of death and
life, in words not unworthy of their themes.

But while the light burning within may
have been divine, the outer case of the lamp
was assuredly cheap enough. Whitman was,
from first to last, a boorish, awkward poseur. He sang of the workingman as of a god, but
he never did an hour's work himself if he
could live by alms; he sounded the note of
battle for the slave, but he never shouldered
a gun in the fight; he cursed shams, while he
played the part of "bard," as he conceived it,
in flowing hair and beard, gray clothes, broad
rolling collar and huge pearl buttons, changing
even his name to suit the rôle; he saluted
Christ as "my comrade," declaring that "we
walk together the earth over, making our
ineffaceable mark upon time and the eras,"
while he, Whitman, was loafing in a
comfortable house in Camden, provided for him
by charity, accepting weekly the hard-earned
money of poor young men, while he had thousands
hoarded which he spent in building a
tawdry monument to himself. As to the

immorality in his poems, it is not worth while to
talk of demoniac possession, as do his enemies.
Whitman simply was indecent as thousands
of other men are indecent, who are coarse by
nature and vulgar by breeding. Hawthorne,
when he saw the Venus of the Uffizi Palace,
acknowledged its greatness, but added, "To
my mind Titian was a very nasty old man"
- a criticism which goes to the root of the
matter in Whitman as in Titian, and leaves
no more to be said.

These were men of genius. But there have
been others in my time who had no genius,
but who succeeded in acquiring great influence
over their generation by the exactness
with which they knew and used their talent.
Self-recognition, perhaps, would be the best
name for the quality.

Of course we all, at once, think of Macaulay
as foremost among these skillful and prudent
craftsmen in the clan that deals with
ideas and words.

In this country Dr. J. G. Holland, probably,
had more of this peculiar clarity of self-insight
than any of our other writers. Greater men

than he sometimes tripped because they ventured
outside of their limits. Poe often essayed
to be scientific, Longfellow dramatic,
and Hawthorne logical.

But the Doctor, or Timothy Titcomb, as he
was called by the worshiping boys and girls
of the sixties, knew his Muse and never mistook
her meaning for a moment. She was no
scatter-brained, raving Delphian priestess, but
a healthy, friendly, clear-minded counselor,
who gave out her oracles daily to the young
folks - oracles alive with kindliness and
common sense.

The Doctor's work in the world was like
the water of a mountain spring, - it brought
out a good, useful growth wherever it went.
We sing the praises of the red wine which
mounts to the head in a fine frenzy now and
then. But we are apt to undervalue the plain
water which keeps things clean and wholesome
for us.

The Doctor himself was as kindly and
wholesome as his poetry. I hope you do not
know already one story of him, which I must
tell you, as it shows how much can be done

Two Americans chanced to meet in Switzerland
one day, and speedily felt a strong
mutual approbation and liking for each other.
One was the then popular poet, Timothy
Titcomb, and the other was Roswell Smith, a
man who had shrewd business ability, a
passionate love of letters, and capital. Together,
standing on the bridge at Bâle, they conceived
the idea of a magazine which should be to
American literature as the lighting of a
great lamp. They came home and issued it.
Dr. Holland was the editor and his friend
the publisher, and as long as they lived the
friendship and the work planned that morning
on the bridge grew and prospered. Neither
man interfered with the other. Each knew
his bounds and kept inside of them.

Outside of business both were friendly,
hopeful men, eager to help their fellow travelers
on their journey. Many a successful author
and artist now living owes his first
chance to the publisher and editor of the old
"Scribner's."

One of the most remarkable men I ever
knew was Daniel S. Ford, the editor of the
"Youth's Companion." He was set apart from
all other men by his total lack of self-appreciation.
He sincerely believed that that paper
was a lever which would uplift the minds and
souls of American children. He gave his life
to this work, but he kept himself wholly out
of sight. The paper was conducted under a
fictitious name. His own never appeared in
it until after his death. He blotted himself
out of view, even out of his own view. It was
a noble trait and almost unique among
Americans.

As for the women who have won fame in
my day, the first fact which strikes me on
turning to them is how entirely the popular
woman of this country differs from that of
older peoples.

We all know the grande dame of France
and England, though we never may have seen
her. She is as distinct a personality as the
Sphinx or the Pope.

She may be beautiful or ugly, a saint or
a Messalina, but she must be the outgrowth

of a class set apart for generations as noble
- finer than God's other creatures, and she
must have, in consequence of this setting
apart, that aloofness, that certain flavor of
rank in manner and in look, to which most
men do bow down even against their will.
Beauty, wit, wealth, and virtue are aids to her
making up, but not necessities. She has done
without each and all of them, and still held
her dominant place in life and in history.

Read the story of Lady Sarah Lennox as
written the other day by her descendants.
She had a current of blood in her veins
coming down through princes from the very
beginnings of England; her kinsfolk were
dukes and earls; French baronnes and
Russian princesses were her familiar gossips.
George III loved her, and she believed
was wretched all of his life because he was
not allowed to place her beside him on the
throne. She was - and never forgot that she
was - of the ruling race in England. But her
mind was of low rank; she talked and wrote
and thought in atrocious English; she was
blind to all of the great issues that move the

world. She made of politics and literature
cheap gossip. Her coquetry, and the crime
to which it brought her, was that of a
barmaid.

Not this the kind of woman surely whom
Americans elect their Great Lady. My
countrymen do not even cede this title to the
American girls whose wealth or beauty has
found places recently for them among the
English nobility. They are good-naturedly
glad to hear that Miss Pratt and Miss Smith
are holding their own as Duchess and Princess
over there. But they pay no more homage
to them now than they did when they
were schoolgirls and wore straw hats instead
of coronets.

There have been, however, a few women
who have been greatly venerated and loved
in this country. There could be no better
index to the kind of man that the American
himself is, than are these women whom he has
delighted to honor.

Oddly enough, the women who have won
the hearts of our populace are not those whom
their own sex has hailed as leaders. No woman

author or clever reformer, no artist, no
champion of her sex, has ever been made a
popular idol by Americans.

The South always chose its reigning favorite,
first for her power to charm, and next for
her beauty. There always has been a reigning
favorite down there. Each city and village
in that quarter has to-day its noted belle,
who is guarded and jealously served by the
public with a pride and devotion incomprehensible
to any man born north of the Ohio.
But far above this countless galaxy have
shone a few fixed stars, whose right to shine
is as certain as that of the moon or planets.

Nelly Custis, Theodosia Burr, Dolly Madison,
the Carroll sisters, Octavia Le Vert,
Sallie Ward, Winnie Davis, - how shall I
call the roll without fear of angry reminders
of the countless illustrious "daughters of the
Southland" whom I have missed? The essential
point to us is, not who they were, but
why were they crowned queens of love and
beauty? What did southern men demand in
the woman to whom they paid allegiance?

and breeding; they sometimes had beauty,
but always that personal attraction, that
sweet, soft, elusive charm of the purely
feminine woman. The old-time Southerners had
very much the feeling toward their reigning
belle that the Italian peasant once had for
the Madonna. She expressed to him purity,
motherhood, and religion, all in one.

I was once in a southern town when one of
these famous beauties passed through on her
way to the Virginia Springs. She remained
all day with her escort in the little village inn,
and all day a closely packed mass of men
waited patiently outside to see her. Probably
every man in the town was there. When the
young girl was brought out at last to enter
her coach, every head was uncovered. There
was not a sound nor a whisper. With a
deference that was almost reverent they gazed
at her beauty and blushes, and stood bare-headed
and still silent until she was out of
sight.

Does this seem ridiculous to you? It was
the natural homage of the man to youth and
beauty and innocence, and I think it was a

The women who have been personally popular
and influential in the North have been
of the same type, with the addition in most
cases of some intellectual force.

At the outbreak of the Civil War the woman
who probably was best known and most
loved in this country was Jessie Benton Frémont.
She was before the public by necessity.
Benton's daughter naturally was known
to everybody. She came, too, from the Virginia
Preston family, and no woman of that
blood ever could be ignored, go where she
might. You might love her or hate her, but
despise her you could not.

Mrs. Frémont, too, was the wife of the
most picturesque of our political leaders.
Everybody knew the story of how he had
won her; how the young girl had seen, as
nobody else had done, in the obscure, poor
young soldier the coming hero, the man ready
to give his life for a great idea; how they had
run away together and married; how he had
conquered a great territory for the country;

how they had starved together in California
and squandered a fortune together in Paris.
The popular imagination was fired by the
young girl, who in September was cooking
flapjacks and bacon for her husband's dinner
in a cañon, and in December sat in the box
at the Opera opposite the Empress, intent
on outshining Eugénie in beauty and in
dress.

When the war began she threw herself with
fervor into the northern cause, chiefly, I
suspect, because it was her husband's cause. She
went with him from camp to camp, to Missouri,
to Virginia, to headquarters at Washington,
firing, uplifting the purpose of every
man who came near her. She had great
beauty, an education more broad and thorough
than that of most men, and a wit and magnetic
charm probably never equaled by any
American woman. Political leaders discussed
their problems with her, and more than once
her keen intuition showed them their way to
success; regiments begged her blessing on
their colors; enthusiastic young men formed
themselves into bands of "Jessie's Scouts"

or "Jessie's Lancers," and went out gayly to
the field to kill or be killed.

But I do not believe that it was her wit or
education or keen intellect which gave her
this power over men. On the contrary, they
were apt to be a little jealous of them. It was
the eager, whole-hearted, beautiful woman,
who ranked her husband as the first of men,
who loved freedom and her country passionately
because John C. Frémont loved them -
that they followed and served.

There was doubtless something in her of
the French grande dame.De Staël had not
a more piercing wit, nor Récamier a finer
quality of beauty, but below and apart from
either was her personal magnetism. Whatever
might be the room into which she came,
whether in a palace or the shack of a ranch,
she was the fire burning in it, the lamp that
shone in it, the instrument of music that
struck a note to which your secret self replied.

The most curious instance, however, of the
power which lies in the purely feminine
qualities in a woman is that of Frances Willard.
In her case, oddly enough, it was her own

sex that was influenced by them. Probably
no woman who spoke English ever had as
large a following of women as she. Shrewd
matrons and eager young girls, who came
once into contact with this gentle, soft-spoken
lady, gave her ever after a passionate affection
and adherence. She undertook an almost
impossible work, to stamp out a universal evil.
She had the courage of a great fighter, but
her methods of warfare were always most
simple and feminine. She told the world the
story of her sister, an innocent young girl
who had planned to do this work for humanity,
and dying, had left it in her hands. She
told the pathetic little story, and then appealed
to women by their love for their homes and
for God to help her to finish the work; she
appealed to men by their love for their
mothers, their wives, and their children, to
suffer them to finish it. These surely were a
woman's ways of working.

I never saw Frances Willard until a year
before her death. Knowing how mighty was
the world-old dragon which she had set out to
slay, and how huge the army which she so

skillfully commanded, I pictured her to
myself as a modern Boadicea, large, strident in
voice, and masterful in manner. I found a
delicate, soft-eyed little woman, wonderfully
tactful, ready to laugh at a joke, ready to fall
into womanish little tempers when contradicted,
but, still more than all, ready to pour
out kindness and affection upon every wrongdoer.
She would not drive him, but would
lead him tenderly up to the straight gate and
along the narrow path.

It was in England that I saw her. Englishmen,
as we all know, have little sympathy
with woman reformers of the belligerent class.
It was amusing to see how quickly they were
disarmed by Frances Willard's most feminine
methods of attack.

I have known other women - whom I do
not name because they are still living - who
have exerted a wider and stronger influence
in this country than any of these of whom I
have spoken. In every instance there is
nothing masculine in their character or
habits of thought; they are womanly, even
womanish in both.

It would seem that, even in this strenuous
day, that woman does her work most effectively
who uses only the woman's methods.

I think that I will end this long gossip
here, not because I know no more great
men, but because I have known so many that
I cannot reckon them.

For it is an odd fact that when we look back
as we grow old, the famous people do not rise
above the nameless folk who filled for us the
years that are gone. Not that the heroes are
less heroic to us, but we see that the nameless
folk only lacked the chance to do great deeds
also.

"Robert Louis Stevenson?" we say,
"Lee? Grant? De Wet? Would not Smith
or Black, whom we used to know, have sounded
as loud bugle-calls as theirs to the world if
the bugle had ever been put to their lips?"

Smith and Black probably puzzled and
bored us when we jogged along the path in
their company, but now that we are old we
see that they were made of heroic stuff.

For it is a mistake to talk of the twilight
of age, or the blurred sight of old people.
The long day grows clearer at its close, and
the petty fogs of prejudice which rose
between us and our fellows in youth melt away
as the sun goes down. At last we see God's
creatures as they are.

So now, when I look back at the long road
down which I have come, it seems to me to
be filled with men and women who could
have sounded the call which leads the world
to great deeds. But the bugle never was put
to their lips.

I see now, too, how unselfish and true were
most of the folk who jostled me every day on
my journey. I used to like or dislike them as
Democrats or Republicans, whites, Indians
or negroes, criminals or Christians.

Now, I only see men and women slaving
for their children; husbands and wives
sacrificing their lives to each other; loveable boys,
girls with their queer new chivalric notions. I
see the fun, the humor, the tragedy in it all;
the desperate struggle of each one, day by
day, to be clean and decent and true.